The Spirit of Capitalism According to the Michelin Company

CORINE VÉDRINE

THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM ACCORDING TO THE MICHELIN COMPANY

ANTHROPOLOGY OF AN INDUSTRIAL MYTH Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology

Series Editors Italo Pardo School of Anthropology and Conservation University of Kent Canterbury, Kent, UK

Giuliana B. Prato School of Anthropology and Conservation University of Kent Canterbury, Kent, UK Half of humanity lives in towns and cities and that proportion is expected to increase in the coming decades. Society, both Western and non-Western, is fast becoming urban and mega-urban as existing cities and a growing number of smaller towns are set on a path of demographic and spatial expansion. Given the disciplinary commitment to an empirically-based analysis, anthropology has a unique contribution to make to our understanding of our evolving urban world. It is in such a belief that we have established the Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology series. In the awareness of the unique contribution that ethnography offers for a better theoretical and practical grasp of our rapidly changing and increasingly complex cities, the series will seek high-quality contributions from anthropologists and other social scientists, such as geographers, political scientists, sociologists and others, engaged in empirical research in diverse ethnographic settings. Proposed topics should set the agenda concerning new debates and chart new theoretical directions, encouraging refection on the signifcance of the anthropological paradigm in urban research and its centrality to main- stream academic debates and to society more broadly. The series aims to promote critical scholarship in international anthropology. Volumes published in the series should address theoretical and methodological issues, showing the relevance of ethnographic research in understanding the socio-cultural, demographic, economic and geo-political changes of contemporary society.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14573 Corine Védrine The Spirit of Capitalism According to the Michelin Company

Anthropology of an Industrial Myth Corine Védrine LAURE-EVS Laboratory, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon Vaulx-en-Velin, France

Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology ISBN 978-3-319-96609-0 ISBN 978-3-319-96610-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96610-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950046

Translation from the French language edition: L’esprit du capitalisme selon Michelin by Corine Védrine, © Publications de l’université de Saint-Etienne 2015. All Rights Reserved. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover image: © Pingebat

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements

A frst, longer version of this book was published in France in 2015 by the Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne. I am very grateful to them for authorising the book to be published in English. I would also like to thank the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon and both the EVS (Environnement Ville Société) and the Laure-EVS lab- oratories for bearing the translation costs. My thanks also go to Karen Tengbergen-Moyes (Academic Language Services) for her very good translation. And I am particularly grateful to Giuliana B. Prato and Italo Pardo who trusted me and kindly encouraged me to publish this work. At last, many thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers for their reading and their comments.

v Contents

1 Introduction 1 1.1 The Research Subject: The Construction of an Industrial Myth to Justify a Company Spirit 3 1.2 The Structure of This Research 10 1.2.1 Defning the Research Subject: Between Fieldwork, Reading and Writing 10 1.2.2 The Research Context: An Urban Ethnography “At Home” 11 1.2.3 A “Retrospective Observation” 15 References 19

2 A Myth Built on the Manipulation of Local History and Memory 21 2.1 A Shared Common History 22 2.1.1 From Rubber to Clermont-Ferrand 23 2.1.2 The Birth of Michelin, the Company and the Product: Invention and Creations 25 2.1.3 Globalisation and Management of the Michelin Company 27 2.2 The Impact of the Company on the City of Clermont-Ferrand: Industrialisation and Paternalism 30 2.2.1 The Industrialisation of the In-Between City and the Birth of “Michelinville” 30

vii viii Contents

2.2.2 The Tenets of and the Social System for Managing the Michelin Workforce at Clermont-Ferrand 32 2.2.3 Paternalism—Complexity and Controversy 41 References 43

3 The Construction of a Myth 45 3.1 Overview of the Body of Narratives, Structure and Classifcation 47 3.1.1 Background and Themes 47 3.1.2 Narrative Structure and Typology 51 3.2 Introduction and Analysis of the Narratives 52 3.2.1 The Founding Narratives 52 3.2.2 The Stories Illustrating the Michelin Spirit 62 References 68

4 Reifed Types of Myth and Company Ritual 71 4.1 The Mythical Figures 71 4.1.1 Bibendum 72 4.1.2 François Michelin 72 4.2 The Objects Supporting the Myth and the Company Rituals 76 4.2.1 The Medal and the Totems 76 4.2.2 The Medal Awarding Ceremony 78 References 81

5 The Myth and Its Justifcations with the Michelin Spirit: The Father, the Son and the Healthy Spirit 83 5.1 The Institutionalising Relation of Interdependence. Rights, Duties and Obligations: The Father Figure 83 5.1.1 The Paternalistic System, the Father or the Parenting Role 84 5.1.2 The Michelin Surname: Transmitting the Name of the Father 87 5.1.3 The Kinship System of the Michelin Family 88 5.1.4 Organisation and Family Saga 91 5.2 Secret, Asceticism and Moral 95 5.2.1 The Secret: Hiding, Discretion and Silencing 95 5.2.2 Asceticism: Discipline, Austerity and Thrift 100 CoNTENTS ix

5.2.3 The Moralistic and Religious Spirit: Moral Entrepreneurs 103 References 108

6 Transmitting the Spirit 111 6.1 The Values Expressed in the Directors’ Discourse and the Written Company Material 111 6.1.1 A Responsible and Respectful Company 112 6.1.2 Industrial Democracy—The Customer Is King 112 6.1.3 Responsible Capitalism and Liberalism Versus the Philosophical Liberalism of the French Marxist Dictatorial Irresponsible State 113 6.2 The Bibs’ School, Religious and Physical Education 115 6.2.1 The Future Bibs’ School Education 115 6.2.2 Religious and Moral Education 120 6.2.3 Michelin’s Grip on Space and the Production of Michelin Space 125 6.3 The Ambivalence of the Benevolent yet Watchful Gaze 132 6.3.1 What Is Exhibited and What Is Hidden: The Attentive Eye of the Exemplary and Grateful Father 133 6.3.2 The Surveillance Gaze: Panoptic, Merit, Sanction, Reward and Control 137 6.3.3 From the Gaze of Peers to the Gaze of Others: The Recognition of Identity 140 6.3.4 Note on the Focused and Discriminating Gaze: The Michelin Guide 145 References 147

7 Between Desacralisation and Feelings of Ambivalence 151 7.1 Resistance from the Michelin Workers—The Voice of Desacralisation 151 7.1.1 The Growing Social Critique Formulated by the Bibs 152 7.1.2 The Employees’ Response in the Face of Feelings of Abandonment and Contempt: Resistance Through Desacralisation 157 x Contents

7.1.3 Speaking Out and Becoming Visible to Regain Recognition in the Public Arena 167 7.2 A Feeling of Ambivalence: The Diffculty of Empowerment 188 7.2.1 The Employees’ Ambiguous Feelings: From Love to Hate and from Fascination to Repulsion 188 7.2.2 The Demand to Keep a Promise to the Clermont-Ferrand Population. The 2001 Publication of Dimanche Du Piéton: Go and See If Michelin Is Still There 190 References 206

8 Conclusion 209 8.1 Back to the Initial Assumptions: Spirit of Capitalism, Recognition and Citizenship 209 8.2 The Brutal End of a Promise Personifed—The Death of Édouard Michelin 213 8.3 The Local Impact of the Development of Capitalism and Its Spirit 216 8.3.1 Mobilising Heritage for the Beneft of the New Michelin Spirit: A New Interplay Between History, Memory and Myth 216 8.3.2 A New Spirit of Capitalism Hinging on the Changing Industrial and Social Michelin Spaces—Reinvesting Through a New Awareness and a New Meaning 221 8.3.3 From Paternalism Towards the Workers to Urban Planning with a Marketing Slant Towards the Executives 222 References 229

Index 231 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 overall structure of the mythical Michelin system 53 Fig. 4.1 The tracks at Cataroux, 2015 (Author photograph) 77 Fig. 4.2 The tracks at Cataroux, 2015 (Author photograph) 77 Fig. 5.1 The circulation and relations between the various elements of the Michelin spirit (At the centre of the diagram is the patriarchal fgure of the paternalistic system, the exemplary “father” and educator in the Michelin spirit) 103 Fig. 6.1 The company’s discourse map 114 Fig. 6.2 Another moralising place in the La Plaine district: Jésus-ouvrier [Jesus-worker], one of the two churches built by Michelin in 1927 and rebuilt in 1972 (October 2015) (Author photograph) 129 Fig. 6.3 The redeveloped site of Les Carmes (2015) (Author photograph) 132 Fig. 6.4 The austere buildings of Cataroux (2015) (Author photograph) 132 Fig. 6.5 Entrance to the Cataroux site (September 2003) (Author photograph) 134 Fig. 7.1 Poster of the flm Paroles de Bibs, November 2001 176

xi CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I remember as a child my paternal grandfather going “to Michelin’s” with his satchel in which my grandmother had carefully packed something to eat. Michelin didn’t mean anything to me then: my grandfather just went to work, that’s all. I grew up, until the age of eleven, in Clermont-Ferrand’s southern area, far from the factories, and left the city only to return just before my eighteenth birthday. Moreover, like all other Michelin employees, my grandfather never talked about the company. Only my grandmother would bring up, often passionately, the paternalistic system and the mythical dimension of the Michelin family, praising their simplicity and dislike of waste. I would only listen with half an ear to the stories she was telling me, as I did to my father explaining how he had avoided the “Michelin system” after being expelled from the company schools, in the process drawing a less than appealing picture of the company. Later, as a more attentive adult to my family’s stories and with an ethnologist’s eye, I realised that Michelin and its spirit hinged on a complex set of elements, and that they were frequently discussed in Clermont- Ferrand. The company also seemed to trigger different feelings, rooted in the three different attitudes alluded to earlier, namely silence, praise and rejection, each one justifed by the “Michelin spirit”. To the locals, keeping silent is one of the qualities of those endowed with the Michelin spirit, as embodied by the eponymous family whose key members have become leg- endary. This spirit sometimes commands respect, indeed admiration, and

© The Author(s) 2019 1 C. Védrine, The Spirit of Capitalism According to the Michelin Company, Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96610-6_1 2 C. VÉDRINE sometimes it is decried, even treated ironically, but it never leaves anyone indifferent, everyone in Clermont-Ferrand having a view on the matter. Therefore, the initial questions governing this work are as follows: what is the Michelin spirit? How can it be defned, what are its contents and how is it transmitted? Also, ethnologically speaking, is there such a thing as the Michelin myth and, if so, how is it structured and what are its aims? My enquiry started in 1999, coinciding with the transfer of power from François Michelin, the charismatic boss who oversaw the paternalistic era, to his son Édouard. Although “father” François stayed on until 2002, the new boss exemplifed the development of neoliberal capitalism and embodied an evolving business spirit aimed at the ever-growing proportion of executives at the various sites in Clermont-Ferrand. What the workers expressed to me at that time were their thoughts on a changing and disconcerting world, as interpreted through the lens of their feelings and skills. Furthermore, while drafting the conclusion to this research, Édouard Michelin died in a boat accident in May 2006, confning my enquiry to the period he managed the company. This ethnographic work therefore bears witness to a particular period in time corresponding to (1) the end of industrial capitalism but also (2) the end of a spirit and a company legend as embodied by a member of the eponymous family, and lastly (3) the local urban change resulting from the transformations of the former industrial city, according to the evolutions of both capitalism in general, and the social composition of the workforce in particular. It has now been twelve since I completed the investigation presented here, which is both a short time and a long time in a capitalist society geared towards the short term. Since then, the number of Bibs (as the employees are called in reference to Bibendum1) in Clermont-Ferrand has kept falling, from around 14,000 to 12,090 (according to the report on employment and working conditions of 31 December 2012), whereas the number of executives and other employees has increased again (25 and 24%, respectively, over all the French sites according to the 2011 report on employment and working conditions) at the expense of the number of workers (51%). I have updated most data in this investigation but the reader should bear in mind that it was fnalised in 2006. This also applies to bibliographical references as in the meantime the social sciences have produced scientifc literature about the growth of capitalism.

1 Bibendum, also known as the Michelin man, is the company’s symbol and mascot. Its history and name will be discussed in Chapter 1 [translator’s note]. 1 INTRODUCTION 3

1.1 the Research Subject: The Construction of an Industrial Myth to Justify a Company Spirit Michelin: this word seldom refers to a tyre brand when used by anyone living in Clermont-Ferrand, but rather to a surname symbolising a dynasty and a spirit. Although “the Michelin spirit” is an expression frequently heard in Clermont-Ferrand, when I asked people to defne it, I was mostly met with a surprised then embarrassed silence. The question seemed almost out of place and the person asking from a different world. How can one not know what it means? Yet defning it remains diffcult and is often attempted through anecdotal illustrations, which invariably end with “That’s the Michelin spirit, you see?” To understand what the “Michelin spirit” entails, I will examine it from the point of view of the three main actors in this context: the company, the Bibs and the people of Clermont-Ferrand. My frst assumption is that the Michelin spirit corresponds both to the spirit of capitalism according to Michelin and to a specifc company culture, endowing it with a symbolic and imaginary role in the eyes of the locals. Within the company, the Michelin spirit validates entrepreneurial thought and the practices linked to it. It corresponds to the spirit of capitalism (Weber 1950) according to Michelin or, in other words and borrowing Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s defnition, to the “ideology that justifes engagement in capitalism” (2005, 8), evolving as it changes. It gives employees reasons (economic, social, moral or security) to commit to the company and remain loyal to it. In terms of content, the Michelin family constructed the eponymous spirit, based on moral and Christian values. It revolves around the exemplary father fgure as paternalism legitimises the system for managing the workforce, and also around the standards governing secret and asceticism that ensure its effectiveness. These standards dictate the employees’ way of being and acting, and foster a feeling of belonging to the frm2 whose values are proudly defended, carried and nurtured by its members. The Michelin spirit therefore also refers to a company culture, meaning a “strategic attempt… at kindling and mobilising consensual

2 The French text uses the term “maison”, which carries connotations that cannot easily be conveyed in a single word in English. This is particularly true when it takes on its primary sense of “house”. “Firm” seems to be the closest translation matching the context and has therefore been used throughout the book [translator’s note]. 4 C. VÉDRINE identifcation refexes with the company for its own ends” (Tripier 1986, 374*3). As a social institution, the company produces ways of integrating through its culture, precisely because it “encompasses a way in which to approach the integration of a group of individuals within a society” (D’Iribarne 1989, 273*). By providing a common cultural model, the company creates identifcation, which is shared by the various social membership groups associated with occupation, hierarchy, ethnicity, trade unions, etc., thus ensuring staff loyalty. This echoes the ideological aspect of the notion of spirit of capitalism. The company culture “affects the way of governing people” (D’Iribarne 1989, 9*) and makes living together possible by promoting shared standards and values to which the employees generally subscribe. At Michelin, these values are part of a Christian and paternalistic discourse. The standards ensure that the secret is kept and that the practices remain ascetical. They govern the ways of working together, of entering into confict, of submitting to hierarchy, of defning fairness and unfairness, good and evil, what is deserving and what is not, etc. (D’Iribarne 2002). Also, from the employees’ perspective the company culture is not a strategic tool but rather a complex of skills and life perspectives guided by ideal references, which fnds expression in the practices, images and beliefs linked together in a coherent whole. According to Italo Pardo, “highly valued material assets are often transacted with stress on meanings – e.g., sentiment, self-representation, own moral image among signifcant others – beyond basic material need and strictly mon- etary value” (Pardo 1996, 10). At the heart of its cultural identity, the Michelin spirit weaves a system of belonging, which directly generates the feeling of belonging to a community through parameters of living together, a community that is gathered under the same emblem “Michelin”, or even “father Michelin”. In other words, the culture “builds a system of social meanings” that provide an interpretation grid for the world, giving it meaning, and that “shape the ‘self-evident facts’ which [individuals] rely on to act ‘rationally’” (D’Iribarne 1989, XIV*). Asking a Bib to defne the Michelin spirit is tantamount to asking him to defne the culture which he belongs to, a diffcult task for someone who is one of its more or less acculturated members. This explains why

3 An asterisk indicates that the work that is being quoted has not offcially been translated into English. The English version is therefore the translator’s and the page number refers to the French version. 1 INTRODUCTION 5 the people I spoke to found it diffcult to defne the Michelin spirit and why only those mocking or condemning it were able to offer a description, however negative, thus forcing a defnition of its outlines which were described as “military”, “strict”, “narrow-minded”, “austere” and “stingy”. Clermont-Ferrand itself sees the Michelin spirit as the spirit of a company with a symbolic role since it is an emblem captivating the locals’ imagination, especially as most of them have at least one Bib among their friends or relatives. The paternal fgure therefore also plays a role outside the factory. When in 1886 the brothers André and Édouard Michelin took over the rubber manufacturing company from their grandfather and transformed it in 1891 into a tyre factory, the population of Clermont- Ferrand consisted mainly of ploughmen, craftsmen and winegrowers. The company’s growth was the driving force behind the city’s demographic expansion and soaring industrialisation. The company’s presence tripled the population, from 40,000 to 120,000, in the space of ffty years as the employment opportunities led to migration from rural areas and immigration from abroad. In the late 1970s, the company employed more than 30,000 staff in its local factories. As a result of its economic, spatial, demographic and therefore political power, the new industrial city was soon nicknamed “Michelinville”. The history of the company and the Michelin family is thus embedded in Clermont-Ferrand’s history. Michelin is not only the symbolic father, that is to say the embodiment of the paternalistic model, for his workers but equally for the locals who are grateful to him for providing for and educating the city. It is an important benchmark for the city’s population and feeds its imagination, in particular by linking the Michelin spirit to urban space and spreading mythical stories. I will come back to this. Indeed, Michelin gradually imposed itself as the true urban decision-maker, translating its discourse into the space it created, developed and organised within the company as well as in the city. Indeed, As Jerome Krase demonstrated, spaces are the witness of the culture, since the cityscape carries social and cultural meanings (Krase 2012). The discourse of Michelin, both paternalistic and disciplinarian, is anchored in an ideological and functional urbanism and architecture, and expresses the austere spirit, which has contributed to the construction of a local identity as it spread to an important part of the population. For the locals, the Michelin spirit with which the Bibs are endowed is almost related to ethos (“mores” in Greek), that is, a set of moral 6 C. VÉDRINE standards governing social activity. Bateson, who coined this term in his study of the Iatmul society, defnes it as “the expression of a culturally standardised system of organisation of the instincts and emotions of the individuals” (1958, 118, emphasis in original). The author adds: “any group of people may establish among themselves an ethos which as soon as it is established becomes a very real factor in determining their conduct” (1958, 120). Just like culture, the ethos is in permanent movement and cannot be separated from the eidos, or the “standardi- sation of the cognitive aspects of the personality of the individuals” (ibid., 220, emphasis in original), which the locals refer to as “education” of the spirit, whether they subscribe to it or condemn it, in which case they are more likely to talk about “brainwashing”, “moulding”, “shaping” or “conditioning” the spirit. The second assumption I would like to explore is that, in order to justify the set of standards and instructions governing the Michelin spirit, the company constructed a local myth based on manipulated history and memory (manipulated in the literal sense of “handled” and in the fgurative sense of “infuenced”) as a eulogy to its owners. In our defnition, a myth is a symbolic narrative about the origins (Pottier 1994) featuring a subject-hero (Fabre 1998), whose greatness is made into an identifcation point and whose contents reveal its cultural foundations. Told and transmitted verbally and in writing to the employees and the locals, the mythical narratives are based on the key fgures in the dynasty. They are mobilised to establish and reaffrm the usefulness of rules, customs, practices and values inherent to the Michelin spirit. These stories are brought up during rites of institution such as the medals ceremony rewarding company loyalty, but they are also instrumental in reassert- ing the strong social relations between the Bibs on the one hand, and between the employees and the boss on the other. Therefore, the staff do not subscribe to the Michelin spirit out of sheer acquiescence but rather because it allows peers or other members of the company, including the benevolent father fgure, to be recognised. “Being Michelin” and having the Michelin spirit offers identity roots and social protection. My third assumption is that the changes in capitalism, which became noticeable from the 1980s onwards and locally found expression through the end of paternalism and the lay-off of over half of the employees in Clermont-Ferrand (from 30,000 in 1982 to approximately 14,000 in 2006 and 12,000 today), have revealed the ideological aspect of the Michelin spirit. The demise of the father fgure, the end of local job 1 INTRODUCTION 7 prospects and the string of “moral wounds” (Lazzeri and Caillé 2004) that ignore the value of the work carried out by the employees, and of the employees themselves, led to the deconstruction of the Michelin myth. As for example Giuliana B. Prato showed in her work about the regime change in Albania, or Manos Spyridakis in his work about the effects of European policy in Greece, general decisions and evolutions impact the people’s daily life and identity (Prato 2010; Spyridakis 2013). The Bibs and the people of Clermont-Ferrand pinpoint the change in management of the company to 1999, the year Édouard took over from his father François. With many rumours circulating about his professional training which took place in the USA and earned him the nickname “The American”, Édouard Michelin represents, in the eyes of the employees and the locals, the end of his father’s policy of paternalistic management as exemplifed by “the Michelin case”: a few weeks into his new position, the new boss sparked outrage by announcing 7500 job cuts in Europe in the wake of a substantial proft increase at Michelin. Édouard Michelin’s arrival thus marked the start of the era of the “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005), which was no longer aimed at the dwindling number of workers but at the executives who were provided with fresh arguments to commit to the company. These new industrial driving forces (ibid.) from all over the world were not familiar with local history and not inclined to identify with “father” Michelin but rather with work and a less paternalistic company spirit. These were the new actors who desacralised the company, choosing to refer to François Michelin as “the old man” rather than with the respectful title “father”. However, the workers were the frst ones to desacralise the company. They felt abandoned and treated with contempt by the father they were seeking redress and public recognition from, both in court on the grounds of trade union discrimination and by bearing witness to their betrayal in a short flm, Paroles de Bibs [Bibs’ Words], released in 2001. Vital to social peace, recognition lies at the root of identity issues and an ethics of happiness in that it depends on “a kind of initial decision that can defne what is to be considered important”, according to Lazzeri and Caillé (2004, 113*): here the value of the worker and his work are sometimes replaced by machines and sometimes relocated abroad. Although the demand for recognition is strong, desacralisation remains nevertheless tentative. Many Bibs and locals are not prepared to see Michelin’s symbolic fall, which would lead to the demise of a secure 8 C. VÉDRINE and structured system. The ambiguous relations between the employees and their boss on the one hand, and between the city and the company on the other explain why desacralisation is being resisted—and this is my fourth assumption. “Father” François Michelin fed, housed, provided care and education, advised, organised funerals, declared himself guardian before the state of the “in-house” orphans, shouldered their education until they came of age, etc. Apart from being a company, Michelin is frst and foremost the mythical fgure around which social relations are built, as well as a system that provided protection and social security. Today, faced with resentful Bibs demanding recognition, Michelin embodies the ambivalent father fgure. On the one hand, he created the company and the industrial city and provided for his employees and the city. On the other hand, he betrayed and abandoned “his” workers and consequently “his” city by moving to another country, the workshops being so old now that it is feared that manufacturing may be moved abroad altogether. The spirit he advocated and which the staff confdently subscribed to has by the same token been shown to be an exploitation system, which some condemn and others refuse to see because of their inability to admit that they’ve been betrayed and to react accordingly. As for the locals, they are wedged between their admiration for the iconic company and the wish to shed an antiquated image spread through outsiders’ eyes. Spurred on by those who have divorced themselves from the Michelin spirit and supported by the newcomers, the town council is trying to break away from this image that has been extensively fuelled by the media. It attempts to rethink social relations, based on a new city life under construction, by stimulating new practices that will gradually master and take over the space that is being rede- signed. This is a challenge for a city whose inhabitants expect Michelin continue guaranteeing and bearing responsibility for all things, good and bad. This in turn is an ambiguous position as it vacillates between the benevolent father fgure and the tyrannical father of the abused Bibs. Broadly speaking, the urban change in Clermont-Ferrand evidences the evolutions of capitalism. To be more precise, the city changes according to the needs of one of the main actors of capitalism in the world. The industrial city has becoming a white-collar city, because of the new social confguration of the frm, the dwindling numbers of blue-collar workers resulting not so much from layoffs as from retired employees who have 1 INTRODUCTION 9 not been replaced. For example, although this book is not about gentrifcation, nevertheless, the actual process of gentrifcation in Clermont- Ferrand does not result from “displacements” by “unscrupulous realms to neighborhood change” as happened in Brooklyn (Krase and De Sena 2015). Indeed, concerning the city centre, the former substandard apartments which are being renovated and rented out predominantly to executives, are the object of unscrupulous exploitation of the poor by slumlords… As far as the Michelin workers are concerned, they can beneft from comfortable housing belonging to the frm (see Chapter 5). This does not mean that they are being “displaced” but as and when they leave, the property is sold to middle-class buyers who are looking for accommodation with a garden and a garage (see Chapter 8). More generally, the city is not the victim of unemployment but it is going through a process of social transformation. In this dynamic, to attract white-collar employees coming from all over the world, Michelin and the Clermont-Ferrand municipality have to work hand in hand for both requalifying the urban spaces (as in the inner city) and creating new ones which correspond to the expectations of a new class (not a “creative” one but a consumer one). Various academic works, as the aforementioned ones (Pardo 1996; Krase 2012), have described the production and the control of spaces as ways to educate and control the people. It allows us to adopt a comparative point of view on Clermont-Ferrand where the control of space is now aimed at the white collars, in spaces of consumption and leisure (see Chapter 8). Similarly, as Giuliana B. Prato and Italo Pardo wrote, “while comparative analysis may well yield enlightening insights (see, for example, Monge 2010; Krase 2012), it is critical to recognise that each of these cities have different history and different meanings for its inhabitants” (Prato and Pardo 2013, 97). As we will see, we are not dealing with an urban change orchestrated by the corruption of the local actors as in Naples for example (Pardo 1996), but by a necessary urban change to include the city in the game of urban competition. Clermont-Ferrand does not have a choice and, in a sense, the help of Michelin is both a constraint (the city is compelled to do what the company needs) and an advantage (the frm provides fnancial and symbolic support through its global reputation). A situation which illustrates, once again, the ambiguity of the feelings towards the frm. 10 C. VÉDRINE

1.2 the Structure of This Research To set out the methodology of my work, I will frstly examine how the research subject defnes the feldwork, reading and writing. Secondly, I will show how researchers are involved in their enquiry. Thirdly, I will outline the two main approaches of this research: observation and interviews.

1.2.1 Defning the Research Subject: Between Fieldwork, Reading and Writing My research subject was continuously redefned by the feldwork and the analyses according to the enquiry, especially as many things happened during my research urging me to refocus my work accordingly: a number of restructuring plans, Édouard Michelin taking the helm of the company in 1999 and his father’s departure in 2002, the release of the flm Paroles de Bibs in 2001, the enactment of the law on trade union discrimination which encouraged Michelin workers to go to court, the sale of Michelin real assets to the town council and various social landlords starting in 1994, the demolition of a Clermont-Ferrand factory in 2005, the registration on the additional list of industrial site historic monuments, the reclassifcation of Clermont-Ferrand’s urban spaces, etc. and fnally Édouard Michelin’s death in 2006 when I was writing the conclusion to this work. There were therefore many episodes and data from the feldwork which needed to be included in the refections and analysis. As the ethnographic methodology “links empirically based analysis to theory” (Pardo and Prato 2012), the research was carried out by going back and forth between the feldwork, reading and writing. The reading is included in the exploration, “one of the major source of the ethnology” being “the ethnology itself” expressed in the publications (Fabre 1995, 52). In other words, ethnography consists “in continuously feeding the practice of what ethnology does in all others feldworks” (op.cit.). The sociology and history linked to the myth, to memory and forgetting, fed my refection. Indeed, it was—as is often the case (see, for example, Prato 2012)—necessary to cross disciplines. Although the study of the corporate spirit and the industrial myth lead to the ethnography of a culture and the analysis of mythic narratives, it is diffcult to skip the approach of sociology of capitalism, for instance, not least because the anthropology of capitalism allows us to understand the experiences of the actors. 1 INTRODUCTION 11

“What we call our data are in fact our constructions of other people’s constructions about what they do”, writes Geertz (2003, 213*). In this dynamic, the analysis of the Michelin spirit, the myth and its deconstruction are “constructions of constructions” of what the Bibs and the locals say about it and make of it. In order to approach this construction with the necessary methodological precautions, it is important to examine the place of the researcher in the context of the study.

1.2.2 The Research Context: An Urban Ethnography “At Home” “Bearing in mind that a great part of the world population lives in cities and that urbanization will inevitably grow further, it could be argued that contemporary urban anthropology is Anthropology” according to Giuliana B. Prato (2012, 98) and Italo Pardo (Prato and Pardo 2013, 100), reminding us that urban anthropology “was developing parallel to the study of the anthropologist’s own society” (op.cit., 90), the research in western urban settings “leading to sophisticated analyses of the complex relationships between the individual and the system, between citizen and governance and between local and national processes and policies of global restructuring that fundamentally infuence national decision making” (Prato and Pardo 2010, 9). The evolution of capitalism through the study of the evolution of both the Michelin spirit and the Michelin myth in Clermont-Ferrand cannot be understood without linking an anthropological approach of myth, culture, capitalism as an ideology, and urban setting. As the company does not open its doors to outsiders, the enquiry did not take place in the factories but in the city. However, since the actual work plays no part in the construction of the Michelin myth, this has not been much of an issue. The research seeks to hinge a spirit and a myth to the city: such a study entails de facto an urban anthropological approach, which offers a highlight on the effects of the evolution of capitalism (neoliberalisation, globalisation, etc.) on a local scale. In this sense, “anthropology remains fundamental to our understanding of these processes for it offers a unique, empirically based approach to studying both the micro level in its broader context and the effects that global processes have on the life of the single individual and of whole communities” (Pardo and Prato 2013, 100), as for example Italo Pardo shows with his study in Naples of “the relationship between individual agency and the system in the areas of culture, organization and power” (Pardo 1996, 4). On the other 12 C. VÉDRINE hand, “urban anthropological research has variously recognized the ways in which regional diversity (cultural, social, economic and political) affects urban life” (Pardo and Prato 2013, 97), and an ethnography of the Michelin culture in Clermont-Ferrand offers an example of the way in which inhabitants adapt (1) to the economic, social and cultural transformations of both the company and the city, and (2) to the necessary renegotiation of identity, belonging and more generally citizenship (Pardo and Prato 2010). Furthermore, my research took place not only in a western urban setting, but also “at home”. Choosing Clermont-Ferrand, my place of birth, and Michelin, the company where my grandfather worked, is certainly not a coincidence. That said, if investigating a different geographical and/or social context somewhat blurs the real reasons for the choice of a feldwork, operating in one’s own feld does not provide more clarity as to what is played out in, precisely because the meaning of the adjective “own” is not straightfor- ward. But this is why, regardless of the object under study and the genuine interest in others, it is above all a question of self-ethnology. This is an anthropological goal: understanding others in order to understand oneself. Using Silvana Borutti’s term, Mondher Kilani evokes the “invention of the other”. He says that to invent the other, “one has to understand oneself as living in a world of which we can draw the contours, thanks to the contrast with those of the other” (Kilani 2000, 8). In turn, Michel Agier states, the ethnologist “suggests to each – each person or each people – to try introspection with the help of the mirror given to him by the other” (Agier 2004, 8). For Monher Kilani, it is about “mediat- ing between identity and difference” (op.cit., 14), which is the work of the anthropologist, but not by “reconfguring the other from the same, because it would certainly be his decline, but [through] the fascinated recognition of the distance” (op.cit., 12), be it ethnical or social. Indeed, the geographical distance alone is not enough to make the research subject relevant, frstly because the fascination for the other can also blind the researcher, and secondly because if “traditionally, the method of anthropology presupposes the detachment and favors the exteriority regarding the object of study”, “today, this position has become unten- able and amounts to renouncing to get acquainted with many other discourses” (op.cit., 34). Furthermore, as Gérard Lenclud notes, “once social diversity is acknowledged as the object of the anthropology, there is no reason to withdraw from examining our way of living in society and from incorporating the world in a signifcant system” (1995, 151). 1 INTRODUCTION 13

Of course, as Italo Pardo writes about his anthropology at home in Naples, “situating the analysis between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity is a challenging task, especially when we happen to be addressing issues that are close to us” (1996, 3). But the way in which the ethnologist steps in and gets involved in his feld, regardless of who he is and where he is, is an integral part of his research and its outcomes. Regardless of what is being studied, “we know that his eye is not naïve, his ear not neutral, his observation not innocent” (Fabre 1995, 1*). The researcher is an actor in his feld and if observation and interviews allow an “applied distance” (Althabe 1998, 42*) to be introduced, he must always take into account how his position affects the discourse he is gathering and analysing. Because his own subjectivity is “part of the relation to the other”, “it is therefore irrelevant whether the anthropologist belongs to the culture he studies” (Kilani 2000, 18*). One way or the other, he contributes to it, especially as “it is always our society that defnes the general framework in which the others are placed” (ibid., 19*). The ethnologist therefore brings into his research his own culture, his own history and biases. Emotions play a role despite one’s role of researcher, which is only truly adopted upon returning from the feld, while trying to put some order in one’s notes and understanding the discursive logic from a distance. Although researchers know that they have to shed any preconceptions, this process often unfolds only gradually during the research. I would go as far as to say that the feld only becomes truly ethnological once deconstruction takes place. One has to deal, sometimes clumsily, with feldwork. Like any other work, it is time-consuming and often laborious, disappointing or even dispiriting at both the research and the analysis stage. Somehow the feld also works on us by developing the way we view the outside world. For example, the research starts with a somewhat romantic view of the working class, which in the meantime has undoubtedly become less naive. Besides, the anthropologist is physically involved in his enquiry as his body, “frst medium of the feld survey” (Cefaï 2003, 545), is both an “organ of the exploration of the world” and an “organ of presentation in public” (op.cit., 469). In a research approach, he mobilises what Daniel Cefaï calls the “corporal competences”, namely “know how, seeing and people”, which are “involved at the outset in the process of comprehen- sion in situ” (op.cit., 469), and sometimes facilitated by the approach of the anthropology at home. This “corporal praxis” (op.cit., 545) allows the anthropologist to progress his feldwork with the appropriate codes, 14 C. VÉDRINE

“to be “in line” or “in touch” with the events of the enquiry and “on the same wavelength” as the respondents he is dealing with” (op.cit.). His “corporal competences” allow him to avoid clumsiness and to win the trust of his informants. Clothing, posture, the vocabulary used, the way to act and to react to situations all shape feldwork. In concrete terms, Agier tells us that feldwork “means forging personal relations with people we did not know until then and meeting them is a bit like breaking in” and he recommends: “We therefore have to convince them that we are there for a good reason”. In short, “no knowledge without a relation” (2004, 36*) or without “strong contin- uous interaction” (Pardo 1996). What is more, ethnological knowledge is “knowledge about relations and born of relations. Affectively, emotionally, we don’t emerge unscathed” (ibid., 47*): apart from the fact that feldwork can be disenchanting, it is a potential source of friendship and confict in equal measure. Some fortunate encounters have resulted in friendships whereas some experiences were not as happy. All research has its own challenges. Often the persons I spoke to would warn me against such a delicate subject or would threaten and seek to intimidate me, hoping to discourage me and make me abandon my project. When I explained the subject of my research, I often received warnings such as “Are you looking for trouble or what?”, “Your subject stinks” from workers, or “Anything you say will be held against you” from the executives. The people of Clermont-Ferrand and the staff are more often than not critical of the local company but become its perfect ambassadors when faced with any unwelcome criticism from outside, which is immediately met with arguments in defence of “the frm”. Thus, Bibs who would normally vouch for the Michelin spirit are wary of outsiders who are unable in their eyes to understand how this big and often castigated company works. My informants have also often warned me that my tele- phone might be tapped and that the RenseignementsGénéraux4 might be following me. The above remarks about anthropology at home raise the debate about the pitfalls and the advantages of this method: “one question is whether doing research ‘at home’ automatically allows a deeper understanding of the meanings that people give to their environment or the researcher is instead restricted by a failure to grasp the signifcance of what may appear obvious” (Prato 2012, 86). In my case, as the

4 French intelligence services [translator’s note]. 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Clermont-Ferrand company has fuelled hostility towards intellectuals, introducing myself as a social sciences researcher and the granddaughter of a Michelin worker, often helped me “to fulfll a basic requirement of ‘understanding’” (Pardo 1996, 3), eased the distrust and made people in the company more amenable to trust and to talk to me. Indeed, once their concerns were dispelled, the people I spoke to and often have made friends with were glad to help me with my research. My informants were workers, executives, retired employees and Clermont-Ferrand residents. Some employees were members of its Works Council [comité d’établisse- ment].5 Since Michelin does not allow any outsider on its premises and denies access to its archives, they regularly provided me with documents. When Hannerz says that informants are sometimes very close to the research assistants (1983), this is indeed what I felt with my favourite informant. He dealt with many fles and through his trade union functions, he was able to access both a substantial number of documents and of a wider network of knowledge which completed my observations and the corpus of the interviews.

1.2.3 A “Retrospective Observation” Observation was at times direct, and sometimes participant. Often “foat- ing” (Pétonnet 1982), observation allowed me to apprehend the industrial, social and urban spaces of my feldwork. I carried out participant observation, in the frst place as an inhabitant of Clermont-Ferrand myself, which allowed me to live many interactions, to refer to Goffman, as much in the public as in the private spaces. To the Clermont-Ferrand residents most of these interactions may appear anecdotal, for the eth- nographer it takes on a different meaning. Participant observation can be defned as the “incorporation of the feldworker into a group, if possible without interfering with the ordinary activities” (Cefaï 2003, 501). Daniel Cefaï adds that “Bulmer suggests the term ‘retrospective participant observation’ for those researchers who have local status or are actors in their own right before they acquire a feldworker ethos and return to

5 The comité d’établissment (for companies with several sites), or Works Council, is a legal requirement in French companies with ffty staff or more. It is a body consisting of elected employee representatives, nominated union representatives and the head of the company. It is fnanced by the company and organises social events and negotiates benefts [translator’s note]. 16 C. VÉDRINE their origins, which have now become feldwork, and those who are close to them, neighbors or colleagues, and who have become their informants”. We speak of “endotic” observation when the “feldworker is working towards denaturalising a familiar world” (Cefaï 2003). It is diffcult to make a well-considered distinction between direct observation and participant observation. I attended events and demonstrations which allowed me to make an ethnography thanks to a methodological approach and a feld notebook, but the boundary between direct observation and participant one is not always clear. When I went on a guided tour of the “conservatoire Michelin”, I was participating as a visitor among others, yet at the same time, I was carrying out direct observation of the tour. When I attended the projections of the movie Paroles de Bibs, I was part of the audience, and here again I took an approach of direct observation. On other occasions, I was given a good opportunity to simultaneously observe and be in a position of “knowing each other better” with the informants (Prato 2012, 84): the travelling exhibition to mark Bibendum’s centenary in 1998; the 1999 demonstrations when 7500 job cuts in Europe were announced; several screenings of a documentary flm, Paroles de Bibs [Bibs’ Words] between 2001 and 2005; the Dimanches du piéton [Pedestrian Sundays], a walk through the Michelin factories organised by the local newspaper La Montagne in 2001; visits to the conservatoire Michelin in 1999 and 2003; the court hearings in the trade union discrimination cases before the industrial tri- bunal [prud’hommes] in 2004; also in 2004 a visit to the Michelin school “La Mission” on its open day and a trip to the Cataroux test tracks with the Clermont-Ferrand École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture, and Édouard Michelin’s funeral in 2006. Although the ethnographic description allows the collection of data, many cannot be obtained through observation and this requires studying documents from public or private archives. I have spent quite some time at the Works Council in particular… My informants and the people I have spoken with or met by chance during my research have also often lent me personal documents, bearing witness to their time at the company, or documents belonging to relatives. These “secondary sources” (Prato 2012) were also complemented by the archives of both local newspapers (La Montagne and Info Magazine) and the municipal bulletin Demain Clermont-Ferrand. Organizations as the OPAC [Offce Public d’Aménagement et de construction] or the Superior National 1 INTRODUCTION 17

School of Architecture of Clermont-Ferrand were also useful sources of information. For the interviews relied as much on places as on networks. Furthermore, I have carried out seventy-fve in-depth interviews and forty other informal conversations as I met various people,6 often in cafés or at social events, when I did not expect to have to get out my feld notebook: a friend of a friend, or their father, turned out to be a Bib, starting a long and unexpected conversation. It is not diffcult to meet Michelin employees in Clermont-Ferrand. Virtually every resident is connected to a Bib: a relative, a neighbour, a friend, an acquaintance’s spouse or parent, etc. Similarly, everyone has a story to tell and everyone has much to say about the company. As Françoise Zonabend points out, “oral memory is supported by seeing and hearing: I have seen, I am told” (1999, 19*), and “they say that” is at the heart of many a conversation. I have carried out interviews with employees (workers and executives), retired employees from the factories or the company’s social services (former teachers, sales assistants of the shops, social workers), and with spouses, children and grandchildren of employees in order to understand the transmission of the Michelin spirit and the myth to family members (especially if they attended the company’s social services, such as the school). Similarly, I have interviewed local residents who had no direct link with the company (often informal interviews) to understand the how the Michelin spirit and myth connect to the city. As indicated above, it is easy to meet a Bib and each and every inhabitant has something to say about Michelin: thanks to the system of “snowballing”, I was able to interview a substantial number of people. I stopped inter- viewing when the sample was suffciently representative of the frm and the city (in terms of age, gender, geographical origin, social origin, trade union membership, place of residence—in a former Michelin property or not), and the interviews’ contents were redundant. It was also necessary to complete this sample with the flmmaker of Paroles de Bibs. In order to work on the image of Clermont-Ferrand, I met two employees from the local newspaper La Montagne, and with two employees from the tourist offce (including a tour guide). At the municipality, I met six people, employees or councillors at the urban services and carried out eight

6 In the interview excerpts used in the text, I have changed the names of the people I questioned to preserve their anonymity. 18 C. VÉDRINE interviews with people involved in the city’s spatial and urban production and transformation: architects, urban planners and geographers from Clermont-Ferrand.7 Most conversations took place in the home of the person I was questioning. Only a handful of trade union members chose to meet at the Works Council premises. Of course, “depending on their status, some of these interlocutors make these interviews very personal or very ‘political’ – the words they use amount, from their point of view, to speaking out” (Agier 2004, 79–80*) but as the interview unfolded, views emerged that were impossible to leave unspoken. The executives in particular, often full of praise for the company, would unwittingly speak not so much like a Michelin ambassador but rather like someone struggling and suffering at work. Similarly, workers with strong loyalties to the boss would increasingly reveal dissatisfaction during the interview whereas resentful employees showed deep respect for “father Michelin”. This study consists of seven chapters. First, I’ll examine the link between history, memory and myth (Chapter 2). I will outline the history of Michelin, the company, and the way it has shaped Clermont- Ferrand’s growth. I will then seek to show how the company has constructed a myth that legitimises the values underpinning the Michelin spirit, in order to justify its business policy and ensure staff loyalty (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I will show how the myth is also reifed and governed by rituals. Chapter 5 aims to defne and describe the Michelin spirit, and Chapter 6 highlights the ways in which it is transmitted. In Chapter 7, I will seek to understand how desacralisation, expressing the social disquiet fostered by the feeling of abandonment and lack of recognition by father Michelin, has recently affected the Clermont-Ferrand manufacturer. To conclude (Chapter 8), I will show how the changes in management in response to the changing spirit of capitalism have forced the town council and Michelin to devise new strategies to attract and keep executives. In this dynamic, the reason for examining the case of the city of Clermont-Ferrand is that it attests to the transformations of capitalism. Indeed, it is far removed from the economic restructuring issues resulting from the trauma of brutal deindustrialisation and redundancy waves. It actually offers an example of social and urban change dictated by the needs of a major force of capitalism whose head offce has remained outside Paris.

7 In addition, since 2006 I have had many more informal conversations. 1 INTRODUCTION 19

References Agier, Michel. La sagesse de l’ethnologue. Paris: L’œil neuf Éditions, 2004. Althabe, Gérard. “Ethnologie du contemporain et enquête de terrain”. In Démarches ethnologiques au présent, ed. Gerard Althabe et Monique Sélim. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 37–47, 1998. Bateson, Gregory. Naven. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958. Boltanski Luc, and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso, 2005. Cefaï, Daniel. “L’enquête de terrain en sciences sociales”. In L’enquête de terrain, Daniel Cefaï (textes réunies, présentés et commentés par). Paris: Editions la Découverte/M.A.U.S.S., pp. 465–615, 2003. D’Iribarne, Philippe. La logique de l’honneur. Gestion des entreprises et traditions nationales. Paris: Seuil, 1989. D’Iribarne, Philippe. Cultures et mondialisation. Gérer par-delà les frontières. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Fabre, Daniel. “Introduction”. In Vers une ethnologie du présent, ed. Gérard Althabe, Daniel Fabre, and Gérard Lenclud. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, pp. 1–5, 1995. Fabre, Daniel. “L’atelier des héros” .In La fabrique des héros, ed. Pierre Centlivres, Daniel Fabre, and Fraçoise Zonabend. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1998. Geertz, Clifford. “La description dense. Vers une théorie interprétative de la culture”. In L’enquête de terrain, ed. Daniel Cefaï. Paris: Editions la Découverte/M.A.U.S.S., pp. 208–233, 2003. Hannertz, Ulf. Explorer la ville. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1983. Kilani, Mondher. L’invention de l’autre. Essais sur le discours anthropologique. Paris: Payot Lausanne, 2000. Krase, Jerome. Seeing Cities Change. Local Culture and Class. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Krase, Jerome, and De Sena Judith. “Brooklyn Revisited: An Illustrated View from the Street. 1970 to the Present”. Urbanities, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 3–19, 2015. Lazzeri C., and A. Caillé. “La reconnaissance aujourd’hui. Enjeux du Concept”. Revue du MAUSS, no. 23. “De la reconnaissance. Don, identité et estime de soi”. Paris: Éditions La Découverte MAUSS, pp. 88–115, 2004. Monge, Fernando. Baltimore, or Boston, in Barcelona: Engaging Mediterranean Port Cities and the New Urban Waterfront. In Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance: Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region, ed. I. Pardo and G. B. Prato. Abington: Ashgate, 2010. Pardo, Italo. Managing Existence in Naples. Morality, Action and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pardo, Italo, and Prato Giuliana B. Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance: Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. 20 C. VÉDRINE

Pardo, Italo, and Prato Giuliana B. “Introduction: The Contemporary Signifcance of Anthropology in the City”. In Anthropology in the City: Methodology and Theory, ed. I. Pardo and G. B. Prato. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–28, 2012. Pardo, Italo, and Prato Giuliana B. “Urban Anthropology”. Urbanities, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 80–110, November 2013. Pétonnet, Colette. “L’observation fottante. L’exemple d’un cimetière parisien”. L’Homme, vol. XXII, no. 4, pp. 37–47, 1982. Pottier, Richard. Anthropologie du mythe. Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1994. Prato, Giuliana B. “The “Costs” of European Citizenship: Governance and Relations of Trust in Albania”. In Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance: Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region, ed. I. Pardo and G. B. Prato. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 133–151, 2010. Prato, Giuliana B. “Anthropological Research in Brindisi and Durrës: Methodological Refections”. In Anthropology in the City: Methodology and Theory, ed. I. Pardo and G. B. Prato. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 79–100, 2012. Spyridakis, Manos. The Liminal Worker. An Ethnography of Work, Unemployment and Precariousness in Contemporary Greece. Dorchester: Ashgate, 2013. Tripier, Maryse. Culture ouvrière et culture d’entreprise. Sociologie du travail 28 (3): 373–386, 1986. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by T. Parsons. London: Allen & Unwin, 1950. Zonabend, Françoise. La mémoire longue. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1999. CHAPTER 2

A Myth Built on the Manipulation of Local History and Memory

It is diffcult to present the mythical narratives without frst introducing the history of the company that inspired them. The whole exercise soon faces the delicate question of entanglement of history, memory and myth. They feed each other and the narrative of one and the same story will shape at times an historic episode, at other times a memory and sometimes a mythical story. The reader will realise the extent of the mythical dimension permeat- ing from the outset any writing about Michelin, including works by historians. Most statements could be presented as “Historians report that” or “The authors say that”. The choice of defning moments that have marked the development of the company, with its discoveries and inventions, suggests an epic with the successive heads of the company in the role of the hero. The analysis of the creation of the myth, which following an overview of the history of Michelin, will show how a historical event becomes a mythical narrative by virtue of its power to provide a source for the company’s maxims, rules, standards and values and because it is told through a somewhat enchanted narrative and fnally because it is believed. Therefore, an ethnologist will not so much be interested in the accuracy of the historical facts themselves but rather in what is being told (and also the fact that it is being told): what are its source, its causes and its means?

2.1 A Shared Common History The writing of this history is based on various sources. In the frst place there are not only the academic works by historians, economists and geographers but also books and articles by, on the one hand, journalists and, on the other, local scholars who more often than not witnessed the history they describe. Finally, books, leafets and magazines published by the internal communication department of the Michelin company itself, archived by its Works Council. Different authors tell the company’s history in different ways: from scientifc to literary, from ironic to politically engaged. Since the company’s records have only been available since 2004, albeit with many restrictions, I had to rely on a number of external sources, mainly the archives of bodies such as the département, the Michelin Works Council, trade unions, local and national newspapers, and chambers of commerce. As Paul Ricœur points out, history starts with oral transmission before any written trace is recorded. In other words, “archives constitute the frst writing that confronts history, before it completes itself in the literary mode of ‘scripturality’” (Ricœur 2006, 138). History is “through and through writing” (ibid., 228), the “threefold adventure of archival research, explanation and representation” (ibid., 138), always interpret- ing selected material. If writing allows history to move away from memory by classifying and analysing, it is always the result, in the same way as the whole body of sciences, whether “exact” or “human”, of work carried out by man within a specifc social, cultural, political or other tradition. Before writing, it is therefore “through the narrative that a link can be established between these two aspects” (Dosse 2000, 186*) of history and memory which Pierre Nora defnes as follows: “Memory, being a phenomenon of emotion and magic, accommodates only those facts that suit it. It thrives on vague, telescoping reminiscences, on hazy general impressions or specifc symbolic details. It is vulnerable to transfer- ences, screen memories, censorings, and projections of all kinds. History, being an intellectual, nonreligious activity, calls for analysis and critical discourse. Memory situates remembrance in a sacred context. History ferrets it out; it turns whatever it touches into prose” (Nora 1996, 8). Alongside Nora, sociologists and ethnologists have formulated a more dynamic approach of memory, inspired by Halbwachs’ work. Set in a social, spatial and time framework, it is approached as a social practice. 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 23

Michel Rautenberg, for example, shows that history and memory are not radically opposed but rather “feed each other” (2003, 26*). The difference lies in “the way they are transmitted”. If history is writing the past on the basis of archives, “memory transmission, however, remains essentially oral, even when modelled on read texts. Thus, between memory and history the support remains a crucial question […]. The archive can help to rediscover an event, to recapture the living conditions of a particular era, whereas memory will necessarily place this event or era in a long-term perspective, which exists by virtue of the meaning that society ascribes to it today. Memory is a contemporary representation of the past” (Rautenberg 2003, 26–27*). Generally speaking, “the past is to a great extent a matter of looking. Yet the point we look at is just as important as the thing we look at” (ibid., 21*). Structuring the presentation of the history of this complex global company is not easy. Nevertheless, I have endeavoured to summarise the available documentation,1 which I invite the reader to peruse for a fuller and more detailed picture. Therefore, the history I am describing and the way I chose to structure it are in themselves a translation of my own selection… I will analyse in more detail the various authorial fgures who have taken an interest in the Clermont-Ferrand company and in so doing have fuelled the scientifc and fctional aspects (Dosse 2000) of its history. For now, I will address the history of Michelin and its impact on the city of Clermont-Ferrand in order to understand the context in which the company was set up and developed economically, demographically and culturally, generating an industrial myth supporting a specifc company spirit.

2.1.1 From Rubber to Clermont-Ferrand Although in principle nothing can explain why the rubber industry would develop in Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand nevertheless became the French heart of that industry in the nineteenth century. The frst rubber company in Clermont-Ferrand was established in 1832 by Édouard Daubrée, Édouard and André Michelin’s maternal grandfather.

1 I carried out my research between 1999 and 2006. Any subsequent publications have therefore not been included in my analysis. 24 C. VÉDRINE

He came from Paris in 1831 to set up a sugar refnery at Martres- de-Veyre, some ffteen kilometres from Clermont-Ferrand. However, poor results compounded by the foods of the river Allier, which swept away the factory and homes, forced Édouard Daubrée to diversify his activity and switch to rubber. It was his wife who suggested the idea to work with rubber. She was the niece of the chemist Macintosh, the inventor of the method for waterproofng fabrics and cloth by dissolving rubber. Their cousin Aristide Barbier joined the business and the couple moved to Clermont and applied for a patent “for new applications of this yarn”, such as straps, suspenders, garters, and orthopaedic items. About a hundred workers, including ninety women, worked in the workshop of the two cousins and produced twenty-fve kilograms of rubber a day, in addition to the mechanical engineering of agricultural machinery, refnery equipment for the sugar industry, and boiler and machine tools. When rubber moulding started in 1847, the factory of Les Carmes (named after the place where the parent company is still based today) became the biggest producer of manufactured rubber in France, producing joints, valves, pistons, springs and washers, etc. In 1852, Barbier and Daubrée moved from moulding to vulcanisation, a method developed by Charles Goodyear. Five years later, the company “Daubrée et Barbier” was among the fve top French rubber companies, with 190 workers. When in 1864 Ernest Daubrée takes the helm following his father’s death and Aristide Barbier’s death the year before, there are 320 people at the factory, with a still predominantly female workforce. Struggling to manage the declining factory, he makes Mr. Bideau, the notary in charge of the company accounts, joint manager. Faced with fnancial losses and strong local and British competition, Bideau, old and childless, entrusts the business in 1866 to a cousin, Émile Victor Chantrot, and to the oldest Barbier grandson who already is a shareholder of Les Carmes, André Michelin. Having no desire to leave Paris, André convinces his brother Édouard to assist him, the same Édouard who in 1889 gives his name to the company, which now becomes “Michelin et Cie”. Other rubber-processing companies were set up in Clermont-Ferrand as a result of the presence of “Daubrée et Barbier”, which stimulated the creation of new factories such as Torrhion and Bergougnan. However, as of 1914 foreign competition takes the wind out of the sails of most of them. What sets Michelin apart and will allow it to consider going global with its plants is its ability to innovate, create, stimulate, invent and 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 25 capitalise on not just products but also the new automobile world. It is this ability to invent and create new needs that lies at the root of the fascination this company inspires and the myth it generated and fostered.

2.1.2 The Birth of Michelin, the Company and the Product: Invention and Creations When Édouard Michelin becomes managing director of the company in 1888, he only keeps the rubber workshop, which employs twelve workers for the exclusive manufacturing of The Silent, the brake blocks designed by Monsieur Arnaud, a worker at the company. Three years later, Michelin patents the removable tyre, which in the space of two years has been adopted by 10,000 French cyclists. The removable tyre is Michelin’s frst invention to revolutionise tyre design and consequently car design. A number of improvements and adjustments follows, for example the Rail tyre for trains in 1929, the Métalic truck tyre with steel cord carcass in 1936, and the Pilote tyre for passen- ger vehicles in 1938. Michelin’s second major invention, the 1948 radial tyre known as Pneu X, enters the American market in 1956. By 1959, the Michelin workers produce 55,000 tyres per day. The ensuing years are devoted to improving this device and adapting it to all vehicles. Although Michelin largely owes its success to its inventions, development and marketing investment also play a signifcant part. The reason Michelin stands out from other companies is its globally popular “ambassador” named Bibendum, but equally because of the role it has played in developing the automobile world. The company not only ensures that vehicles are equipped with tyres, but it stimulates their development by equipping the road landscape, impacting both practically and culturally. As early as 1900, the Guide rouge [Red Guide] lists the restaurants and hotels the company recommends. André Michelin’s brainchild is then handed out for free to drivers and cyclists. In order to make cars more popular, Michelin also endeavours to make the roads user-friendlier with the help of road marks. The frst Michelin maps are published in 1908. The company then proceeds to number the roads and offers the milestones to Public Works [Travaux Publics] who take on the maintenance. A year later, the company puts up village name signs at both the village entrance and exit. The Signposting Commission [Commission de 26 C. VÉDRINE signalisation] likes the idea and allows the company to line the French roads with thousands of milestones, signposts, road signs and view- point indicators. Of course, as of 1931 the signposts bear the inscription “donated by Michelin”, thus ensuring publicity for the company. Just as André Michelin multiplies the means of advertising in this way, he makes his name known by attending society events to meet politicians and journalists, and joins an increasing number of societies and organisations. Lastly, he is not reluctant to use pamphlets to raise awareness and encourage the French to buy a car. In 1922, he launches “The Big Automobile Survey” [Grande enquête nationale de l’automobile] and publishes a series of pamphlets which give voice to Michelin’s political and economic crusade: “They want to kill the automobile”, “Using an automobile will increase your turnover”, etc. But the very frst advertising medium Michelin uses back in 1891 is sports competitions. Michelin products are successful and are promoted by taking part in and winning cycling, automobile and aircraft races. As a result, Michelin becomes the frst tyre manufacturer in the world to attempt adapting infatable tyres to cars and constructs three cars. After presenting in 1895 the invention for carriages and carts at the Automobile Show [Salon de l’automobile], Édouard and André Michelin drove one of these three cars in the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race. Although the frst prize went to Peugeot, the Michelin brothers nevertheless managed to prove that driving on tyres was possible and from 1896 onwards, Michelin-equipped cars win most national and international races. The invention in 1903 of the demountable rim, which allows cars to carry an infated spare tyre, is part of the automobile boom. That same year there are 6000 carriages with tyres in Paris. The company employs 5000 workers and its sales reach ten million francs. At the Paris Motor Show, Michelin equipped nearly 40% of the cars on show. In 1908, André branches out into aviation. He starts an annual competition in which the record of the year before has to be broken: new performances bring about a succession of Michelin cups. Concerned by the prospect of war and encouraged by the opening of a new market, the brothers André and Édouard Michelin introduce new prizes to improve projectile release as well as launching and aiming devices. In 1914, André Michelin secures General Staff approval for overseeing all new air shooting devices. The Michelin bomb launcher becomes an industry standard for all aircraft leaving for the front. Patriotic considerations allow the Clermont-Ferrand factories to produce 1884 aircraft 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 27 thanks to a largely female workforce, and to manufacture rubberised coats, haversacks, tent canvas and sleeping bags. The death of Étienne Michelin, Édouard’s oldest son killed by a squall in 1932 during the Michelin Prize, marks the end of aviation-oriented initiatives. However, Michelin remains interested in aviation and continues to equip the French Air Force and has been shoeing the US Air Force since 2007. Although at times the company had to withdraw from the race for economic reasons, it has always relied on this type of promotion, and still does.

2.1.3 Globalisation and Management of the Michelin Company The company’s global reach started in 1904 when Michelin opens an offce in London. It is interesting to note that the same year the Michelin Guide rouge [Red Guide], frst published in 1900, broadened its territory to include foreign countries, inter alia with its “Belgium- Holland-Rhine Banks”. Two years later, Michelin opens a plant in Turin, followed by the Michelin Products Selling Tyre Cy in Milltown, NJ, in the USA in 1908. On the eve of the First World War, Michelin is already a multinational and at the end of the war, 8000 people work in the Clermont- Ferrand businesses. In 1924, it opens a purchasing offce in Singapore and starts an experimental plantation in Indochina. Throughout the 1930s, it establishes frms in the rest of the world (the UK, Germany, Argentina, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands). More factories are opened on French soil in subsequent years, in particular the factory of La Combaude in 1960 in Clermont-Ferrand. A testing and research centre with thirty-two kilometres of tracks and circuits is also built in 1960 at Ladoux, some ten kilometres north of Clermont-Ferrand. Between 1960 and 1975, thirty-two plants were built worldwide, bringing the number of Michelin factories to forty-fve, while production at the company increased fvefold in those ffteen years. The 1970s were very successful. In Clermont-Ferrand, Michelin rolls out a recruitment campaign and looks abroad for its workforce. Yugoslavs, Portuguese and North Africans are assigned to the toughest departments of the company: “z” (mixing) and “zh” (spinning). By 1975, there are 100,000 staff against 45,000 in 1965, half of whom work outside France. 28 C. VÉDRINE

Investment is essentially geared towards the USA where Ford becomes Michelin’s frst client. The company is mainly based in south California with a factory in Greenville, opened in 1975, manufacturing touring tyres, and a factory in Partanburg, which starts producing truck tyres in 1968. In the same area Michelin sets up a research centre with substantial test tracks covering 700 hectares, 200 hectares bigger than the Clermont-Ferrand tracks. In Alabama, the Dothan plant manufactures tyres for small industrial vehicles. The company’s growth carries over to South America in 1979, in particular in Campo Grande and Resende, where it builds an entire village with 300 homes. Despite stiff competition from the Japanese Bridgestone and the German Continental, Michelin equips 36% of the US car production and becomes number one worldwide in 1983 with ffty-four factories in France and 35 internationally. The company has 131,000 people on its payroll, including 50,000 in France of whom 30,000 are employed by the Clermont-Ferrand sites. However, the 1980s crisis weakened Michelin and it laid off 18,000 employees worldwide over that decade while its global ranking dropped to number two, behind Goodyear. It took a relocation policy and a series of job cuts in France for the company to regain its global frst place in tyre manufacturing. In other words, since the 1980s the company has abandoned its global presence policy in favour of a policy of internation- alising the workforce. In 2015, the multinational, whose headquarters are still in Clermont- Ferrand, presided over sixty-eight sites in seventeen countries, employed 112,300 people and had a commercial presence in 170 countries.2 One last point will help us gain insight into Michelin’s economic history. It concerns the buyback or takeover of companies in commercial and fnancial diffculties. One example is Bergougnan, which Michelin acquired in 1959; Bull, a manufacturer of punchcard accounting machines (three of Édouard Michelin’s children married a Bull family member); Berliet, which was eventually sold to Renault; Citroën, where Pierre Michelin becomes chairman/CEO in 1935 and Pierre Boulanger vice-president.3 Today, the Michelin group owns various global tyre brands such as Kleber, Goodrich, Siamtyre, Riken and Kormoran.

2 Data from 31 December 2014. 3 Michelin entrusted Peugeot with the management of the Paris company at the quai de Javel in 1976. It still holds 10% of the shares in the Peugeot-Citroën group and remains Citroën’s sole supplier and Peugeot’s main supplier. 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 29

As far as management is concerned, although it has become a global company, the company has always been managed—and still is—as a partnership limited by shares4 to protect the Michelin family members. Although the small family business is now a powerful multinational, the management nevertheless chose to keep the qualifer Manufacture, to highlight the traditional production of tyres, which today is increasingly challenged by new technology and labour automation systems. When in 1889 the company changes its name to “Michelin et Cie”, Édouard is the sole manager. To succeed him, he establishes a regency in 1938, which he entrusts to the two men closest to him: his son-in-law Robert Puiseux and Pierre Boulanger (who dies in 1950). Both Édouard’s sons died before him and his only grandson is just fourteen years old. None of André’s descendants was approached to take over the helm. In 1952, François Michelin, then aged twenty-six, takes his frst steps in the main departments of the company. Three years later, the shareholders appoint him as joint managing director, before putting him in charge of a new team he has put together in 1959 with his cousins Rollier and Franck. Although François Michelin is assisted from 1970 by François Rollier and the Société auxiliaire de gestion “SAGES” (a sim- plifed joint stock company consisting of a number of important retired employees), he is effectively the one in charge. In May 2002, François Michelin offcially relinquishes his management duties in favour of his son, Édouard Michelin,5 who bears his maternal great-grandfather’s name and surname. Since 2006, he has been jointly managing the company with René Zingraff, a former executive. In order to anticipate Zingraff’s replacement, the group’s fnancial director Michel Rollier (François Rollier’s son) is appointed third joint manager in May 2005. When Édouard Michelin dies in an accident in May 2006, Rollier succeeds him at the head of the group until May 2012, when Jean-Dominique Senard becomes the frst sole managing director from outside the Michelin family.

4 This type of corporation is a variation of a public limited company which allows sleeping partners in addition to general partners. Sleeping partners are non-active partners and have no responsibility. Since 1951, the Michelin holding company, a listed company, has been the partnership limited by shares called “Compagnie générale des Établissements Michelin”. 5 Édouard had already been appointed joint managing director in 1991. I will come back to Édouard Michelin’s career. 30 C. VÉDRINE

2.2 the Impact of the Company on the City of Clermont-Ferrand: Industrialisation and Paternalism When in 1832 Édouard Daubrée sets up the frst rubber company in Clermont-Ferrand, the city has 28,257 inhabitants and is essentially a city of craftsmen, winegrowers and vegetable producers. As the Michelin company soars economically through signifcant subcontracting, so do Clermont-Ferrand’s demographics and space. Between 1891 and 1907, the number of people working for Michelin increases from 62 to 4006 and reaches 10,385 in 1919, while the factory of Les Carmes covers an area of 100,000 m2. As the winegrowing industry has been affected by phylloxera since 1894, Michelin has no trouble recruiting a rural workforce locally. It is soon boosted by both the rural exodus affecting the entire Auvergne region and by foreign immigration, largely Portuguese and Kabyle. In 1925, the company has 17,522 employees, 19,072 in 1964 and 28,801 by 1973. In 1982, 30,000 out of 155,000 Clermont-Ferrand residents work for Michelin. This is why as early as 1928 the media dub the capital of Auvergne with its volcanic stone as black as rubber “Michelinville”.

2.2.1 The Industrialisation of the In-Between City and the Birth of “Michelinville” Clermont-Ferrand was born in 1630 from an administrative union between Clermont and Montferrand. But it is ultimately Michelin that joins them spatially by acquiring most of the empty space between the two city centres to build a workers’ housing estate, a stadium and new production units, as well as a railway link between the factories of Estaing, built in 1913, and Cataroux in 1924. The newcomer among religion (Clermont-Ferrand was transferred to the crown and governed by a succession of bishops) and nobility (Montferrand was built by a count) is industry, which advocates a new prevailing discourse, namely science, technology, progress and capital. The arrival of Michelin creates a new space between the two old cities, which is architecturally and socially, if not culturally, typifed by the practices of these industrial, collective, public and domestic spaces but also by the fows it generates. 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 31

Moreover, Michelin creates around ten districts in the 1920s, to the north and to the south of the city. At the same time, Clermont-Ferrand extends westwards with new residential islets near other major employers such as the Banque de France and Torrihon. After the 1960s, Michelin expands to the east of the city with the factory of la Combaude, the large Chantemerle warehouse and the factory of les Gravanches and then to the north with the Ladoux research centre and test tracks. Conversely, in the early 1970s Michelin starts to gradually withdraw from its social projects to focus on a relocation policy. Apart from the economic benefts this entails, the Clermont-Ferrand factories are becoming outdated and are no longer as competitive as the ones that have opened elsewhere in the world. Furthermore, the economic crisis and debt resulting from the acquisition of Uni-Royal compel the company to steer towards major savings which affect above all the employees in Clermont. Between 1983 and 2004, ten successive redundancy plans reduce the staff by half. According to the social audit of the Michelin Works Council dated 27 July 2004, the Clermont-Ferrand sites employed 14,645 people, of whom 306 on a temporary contract. The total number of staff consisted of 11,994 men and 2651 women. During the summer of 2004, 1203 salaried employees were in the process of taking early retirement, including 1015 men and 188 women. Most of them are workers or “agents” (6162) and male (only 603 are female). Supervisors (410, including 10 women), engineers (3268 of whom 437 are women) and employees (1798, including 1172 women—the category where women are most represented in the company) belong to the common “employee” category. This is how they are referred to by the additional company clauses to highlight their role as partners in the eyes of the management on account of their power in the hierarchy, which contributes to a smooth running of the business. This occupational category is usually singled out, as we will see, as the most steeped in the Michelin spirit. Finally, there are 3007 “executives and those of equivalent grade”, with 2578 men and 429 women. Regarding migrant workers, in 1980, while the company employed almost 30,000 people, 3812 were from an immi- grant background, consisting of 3670 agents, 32 executives and 110 employees. Today (2012 data), among the 12,090 employees, 1066 agents, 347 executives and 140 employees are foreign. The majority of agents, most of them Portuguese, perform the most diffcult and 32 C. VÉDRINE dangerous jobs in tyre manufacturing. The executives, on the other hand, come from all parts of the world, especially as internal Michelin policy requires them to follow a training course at the main factory in Clermont-Ferrand. Their increasing numbers refect the changes in recruitment and challenge the company and the town council to rethink their way of attracting and creating loyalty other than through a paternalistic policy towards the workers. I will come back to these points.

2.2.2 The Tenets of and the Social System for Managing the Michelin Workforce at Clermont-Ferrand Paternalism is born from patronage, which in its early forms dates back to Roman times: “Links established in this way concern clients, free citizens or freed slaves who enter into a set of economic and legal relationships controlled and organised by the patron, in other words patron- ised by him”, according to Jean-Pierre Frey (1995, 11*). Theoretically, patronage is voluntarily adhered to but “either way it is a matter of subjugation and advantages to be gained” (ibid., 12*). The main task patronage assigns to itself is protecting children from vice through religious education. Parishes and school bodies provide this form of care, which is governed by a moral obligation. The categories of people affected by patronage were later extended to include prisoners in order to ensure their wellbeing, under the name “patronage of the released”. In the case of worker patronage, other types of relations are established between two new increasingly important fgures, the head of the company on the one hand and, on the other, what was then called the labour “mass”, the workers. In 1891, the Reverend Father Forbes defnes it as follows: “We will call patronage a group of institutions inspired and backed by religion and private charity, aimed at protecting workers from moral perversion in frst instance but also against the consequences of their lack of foresight or any occupational accident”.6 Religion and private charity are called on to set up a welfare system for the education and protection of workers. The vices to be tackled are those resulting from industrialisation, which produces new lifestyles both at work and in the home, with urban migration creating a working class. Two threats are to be addressed: in the frst place the threats generated

6 Études de réforme sociale, les formes nouvelles du patronage, Paris, 1891, quoted by Frey (1995). 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 33 by city life with its dreaded morals and which harbours the danger of growing youth awareness or politicisation on contact with the intellectual classes. Secondly, the threat of a potentially dangerous working class in case of an uprising against the existing order. Faced with the distur- bances brought about by industrialisation, and the place and the role of the father at home in possible jeopardy, it is therefore up to the head of the company to shoulder and take on the father role in order to maintain social peace and to contain any potential confict with an ever-growing working class. The Michelin family has modelled its paternalistic approach to a large extent on the work of Frédéric Le Play. This eminent patronage theorist has voiced his fear of seeing traditional forms of the patriarchal family disappear, warning against an emerging moral decline that such a loss of bearings may entail. Industrial patronage is clearly presented as a coun- terbalance to the waning paternal role established and anchored in rural society. In essence, patronage replaces patriarchy with the head of the company taking on the role of educator, protector and moralist. Social peace, according to Le Play, can only be preserved with the help of six principles observed by the Michelin family: (a) permanent mutual undertakings by the boss and the worker, which supposes free consent by the concerned parties; (b) complete agreement on setting salaries whose “symptom is the absence of any irritating debate” (1891, 127*). It is worth noting here that Michelin followed a policy of high salaries until the 1930s, following Le Play’s advice, which helped prevent any grievances, in particular strikes. When eventually Michelin is no longer able to guarantee ongoing pay rises, it turns to social activities as a compensation to help maintain additional benefts to those offered by its competitors in the job market; (c) fostering the connection to the earth by encouraging gardening and animal husbandry (chickens for example); and (d) getting into the habit of saving, which “indicates the presence of moral qualities” (ibid., 137*). At Michelin, the stay-at-home mother is the prime target for training in how to save and is taught how to “properly” manage the family budget, and particularly a small budget allowing workers to be content with little; (e) the indissoluble bond between family and the home to ensure its dignity; and (f) respecting and protecting women by keeping them at home. Le Play also justifes patronage through mutual respect: just as workers are expected to respect the employer who provides them with work and decent living conditions, the employer has a duty to protect and 34 C. VÉDRINE educate them in order to minimise the risk of social decay. Le Play therefore concludes that “voluntary patronage is as effective as the old system to ward off poverty” (1872, 425*). In Le Play’s view, it is precisely the worker’s consent that distinguishes patronage from paternalism. The expression paternalism emerges in the period 1880–1890 to denote a particular social relation between workers and employers. It is “a term charged, more than any other, with derogatory connotations, and which has spread since the end of the nineteenth century in a controversial sense, thanks to the labour movement’s spokespeople seeking to discredit the employers” (Noiriel 1988, 18*), deemed authoritarian. The paternalistic policy, with its spatial and socio-educational strategies, guarantees public order and for a short while gives the illusion of meritocratic equality. Indeed, the children of both workers and executives wear the same overall and receive the same education at the same schools. The school materials provided by the company standardise and erase the social differences, although social mobility remains limited. Training and employing children is the key to keeping the workforce stable. What is more, it ensures an education in the values of the company, thus fostering social peace to a certain extent. The paternalistic policy is a way to reduce the social gap between classes, while at the same time the employer’ attitude to the workers is condescending. Friendly chats, respect for and interest in the workers on the one hand, mixing with the directors and training them on the shop foor on the other, have undeniably contributed to a symbolic decrease of the social distance between the Michelin family and the staff. It is only when labour becomes the frst victim of the company’s redundancy plans, and respect for it shifts, that the distance between the Michelin family and the workforce is acutely felt. Of course, controlling the workforce in this way allows to simultaneously compensate for the signifcant lack of infrastructure to accommodate them, and to recruit staff who are in constant demand with competitors trying to outbid Michelin in terms of privileges granted. Michelin’s initial strategy to attract and keep workers actually entailed disposing of the competition by preventing other important companies from setting up in the Clermont-Ferrand area, ensuring that the capital of Auvergne remained a single industry city. Finally, paternalism also encompasses an economic consideration as the staff’s pay is redistributed to the employer through rent and purchases at the cooperatives belonging to the company. 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 35

The management history of many major companies such as Dollfus in Mulhouse or Schneider in Le Creusot is a model for Michelin to be either applied or improved on. The advantage for paternalistic nineteenth-century companies such as Michelin is that they are able to build on the experience of others and, as Noiriel (1984) points out, beneft from the awareness that a working class exists, with its own history and active collective memory, and able to express discontent or even anger through strikes and demonstrations with more or less contained violence. At the root of the company’s social work are the concerns of Marie- Thérèse Wolff, Édouard Michelin’s wife, who set up a patronage for the beneft of the children of staff. Convinced of the charitable value of social Christianity, Madame Michelin initiated education for girls, exclusively taught by single women housed at lodgings that were strictly off-limits for men. A female teacher cannot, according to the Michelin family philosophy, fully devote herself to her students if she is a mother. She has to lead by example and is the keeper of morality. Inside the factory, single women have their own dedicated area with access to a library, a piano and sewing machines to fll their leisure time and mitigate the risk that idleness could lead to improper pastimes. As to married women, they have to become “good” mothers and “good” administrators. The tasks assigned to women are instilled within a moral framework in workshops where they are taught to sew, to cook, to make clothes for new- borns, etc. A kind of what we could call maternalism creates a special bond between Madame Michelin and the female workers on the one hand, and among the workers’ wives on the other. Although the philosophy governed by Monsieur and Madame Michelin’s Christian values dictates that women should stay at home, women are nevertheless welcome in the factory’s garment workshops, in particular in spinning, involving intricate work on premises overheated by rubber curing… On balance, women are allowed out of the domestic sphere on two conditions: either as a nurse or as a teacher, leaving medicine and surgery to men, or by carrying out factory work that requires the delicate precision of female fngers. Soon Édouard Michelin, and later his grandson François, decides to continue his wife’s work and embeds it in an all-encompassing welfare policy for the workforce, thus creating paternalistic relations with his staff. 36 C. VÉDRINE

The frst projects are aimed at housing, welfare and education. As far as housing is concerned,7 Michelin starts the construction of workers’ housing estates just when the other leading industrialists are disposing of them, making the company one of the last witnesses of French paternalism. Indeed, the company only relinquishes its housing estates from 1987 onwards. “The estate” refers to housing, fats or houses with a garden, buildings consisting of two to four fats with a separate entrance and garden, and the area including the company’s social, educational and commercial services. The estate, in the sense of housing, is low-rent and is typically laid out with an outside extension in the form of a garden to be cultivated, and separate rooms for parents and children. The central location of the kitchen, both a living and reception area, seeks to replicate, as do the cellar and the garden, a rural domestic set-up. As most staff come from the surrounding countryside, the housing design must ensure continuity, in the spirit of Frédéric Le Play’s principles and recommendations. Initially, the development of the estates relieves the housing crisis in Clermont-Ferrand. Whereas the number of Michelin staff continues growing, the city is unable to accommodate the new workforce, as an important number of dwellings in the city centre remain squalid. Between 1911 and 1980, Michelin created, directly or through its sat- ellites, eighteen districts within Clermont-Ferrand and its inner suburbs. It was in particular in the wake of the First World War that Michelin started buying empty land in Clermont-Ferrand for serial construction, applying to construction the principles of Taylorism which had already proved effective on the shop foor (see Lamy and Fornaro 1990). La Plaine is the largest district built by Michelin between 1926 and 1930, to the north of the city, with 1176 dwellings including 123 specifcally for employees. This area epitomises Michelin’s paternalistic policy since its residents are isolated from the rest of the city and live in a self-suffcient system between the factories and the company’s social services (cooperatives, primary schools, preschool, clinic, church, sports complex and family garden). The “estates” are allocated on the basis of certain criteria. The frst criterion requires the applicant to have been a Michelin employee for

7 For a more detailed discussion of Michelin housing, see Lamy and Fornaro (1990), Gueslin (1993, 1999), and Dietrich (2002). 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 37 at least twelve consecutive months. The second criterion concerns family status. Single employees are given special accommodation. Other types of housing are intended for household heads with at least one child under the age of eighteen. Priority is also given to those who have become homeless following an accident, for example a fre. Elderly people over the age of seventy and the disabled are housed on estates specif- ically designed for their needs from 1947 onwards. The third criterion relates to the number of points awarded by the company. One point is awarded for each year worked in the factory and another point for each year since the application was lodged. The number of children increases the number of points from thirty points for a pregnancy to three points for a child aged seventeen or eighteen. In 1937, another element relating to factory work is taken into account, in the shape of a so-called merit mark awarded by the head of department. Finally, in 1957 two more criteria are introduced: on the one hand, a mark for work attendance, on the other hand an investigation by the company’s social assistance into the state and maintenance of the accommodation occupied by the applicant at the time of his application, and also into the family’s morals. In a nutshell, “the estate” has to be deserved and is subject to the moral values backed and promoted by the company. Adultery, going to a café or poor management of the family budget are the main obstacles to a positive outcome of an application to rent a Michelin “estate”. All in all, 6300 family dwellings and a thousand for unmarried employees spread to the north, the north-east and the south of the Clermont-Ferrand conurbation. Of these 6300 family dwellings, 1300 could be purchased by the tenants and half of these again were built by “beavers”,8 the remaining 5000 being rented out and offered by the company’s housing service. Thus, Michelin becomes the main driving force behind Clermont- Ferrand’s urban development. The city’s frst urban development plan was only drawn up in 1924, leaving the company free to acquire a substantial amount of land, as and when necessary, before turning its thoughts to town planning. However, the introduction of a development plan in no way affected the plans of the company that was now the city’s main property developer.

8 These beavers acquired land at a low price and built their house in a joint effort. The company drew up the plans and provided the required building materials in return for 2500 hours worked (four hours in the evening and eight hours on a Sunday). 38 C. VÉDRINE

Welfare and education, as we have briefy seen, are two key concerns of the Michelin family. Welfare being tantamount to daily hygiene, it translates into standards warranting the impersonal character of domestic space, into instilling moral values into women as discussed above and into a medical–social service managed by the company (which includes a surgical clinic with a maternity ward, an outpatients and frst aid clinic attached to the factory of Les Carmes, a medical department in each factory for work injuries, a special tuberculosis unit, a dental clinic, a team of home-care nurses, a nursing home, a summer camp for girls in poor health aged fourteen to twenty, outdoor education schools in the Clermont-Ferrand area for children suffering from ill health, and seaside facilities extolling the benefts of iodine). Édouard Michelin’s memoran- dum about setting up a medical department makes the benefts to the company clear: medical care prevents absenteeism and ineffcient work. The Michelin family also takes care of maternity, in particular births. Female workers are provided with a nursing room at the factory while older children can go to day care. A caring attitude and child protection bolster a pro-birth policy that echoes a national concern dating back to the nineteenth century. Recruitment diffculties, although partly resolved by immigration, led many company owners to encourage the state’s pro-birth policy. Michelin’s policy does not shrink from pulling out all the stops, brandishing as usual its patriotic fervour. In 1922, the company creates “The Michelin Birth Prize”, consisting of a 270,000 French Francs award to the National Alliance for the Growth of the French Population [Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française]. The frst prize is a reward for the author of “the most effcient propaganda leafet showing France’s critical demographic situation and the most adequate means to counter this threat”. A 1926 leafet states: “Is France able to have more children? Judging from the results at Michelin, we can safely say: yes”, hailing the company’s pro-birth policy which grants an allowance of thirty French Francs (which amounts to a week’s wages for a worker) for each birth and three times this amount if the mother works at the factory. Moreover, in 1920 the company introduces the Michelin family allowance system. Far superior to other systems, in a ratio between 1 and 3, it provides additional benefts such as a reduction of the estate rent pro rata with the benefciary’s number of children. In the foreword to the Family Allocation Services regulations, Édouard Michelin explains: “As early as 1916 Michelin created allow- ances for large families and widows. We are very proud of this. Because it 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 39 is fair to help families with many children, and widows. It is a duty. This duty is compounded by the fact that France’s population is diminishing. We must support big families”. Pride, fairness, duty and honour are the values invoked to justify the company’s pro-birth stance. Finally, caring also entails feeding, clothing and furnishing. The company opens a cooperative restaurant for its employees and their families near the Les Carmes site and 1910 sees the arrival of a variety of specialised cooperative shops, such as butchers, delicatessen [charcuterie], grocers, bakers, shops selling wine, wood and coal, textile, furniture, hardware, tableware, and shoes which are more likely to be referred to as “Socap” [société d’approvisionnement—supply company] in Clermont- Ferrand. These cooperatives were sold from 1988 and many older people still refer to the supermarkets and hypermarkets that have replaced the company shops as “Socap”. As to the educational aspect of Michelin’s social services, the company directors seek to train “good” workers, quality being measured in terms of the degree to which they embody the “Michelin spirit”. Regarding the facilities, DIYers are allowed to use the school workshops to make objects or repair household appliances and buy second-hand tools from the factory. There are also, for staff only, a gardening shop, a poultry- breeding shop, a beekeeping centre and an arboriculture club. A great number of clubs for philatelists, chess players, hunters, fsh- ermen, veterans, skiers, etc. as well as a symphony association and a fne arts society are among the long list of sports activities offered by the ASM [Association sportive Michelin],9 Michelin’s Sports Association. Set up in 1911 and chaired for a number of years by one of Édouard’s sons, Marcel Michelin, the ASM became a famous institution in France thanks to its rugby team. Consisting of a stadium, which now bears the name of its creator, gyms, sport halls and a swimming pool,10 it hosts most physical and sporting activities. Preserving health as a capital to be cherished, maintaining the body and occupying the mind are the three cornerstones of the sports complex. The third one is shared by all the activities offered by the company, which help to prevent idleness and distract from “bad morals” activities.

9 The ASM became the Montferrand Sports Association [Association sportive Montferrandaise] in 1922. 10 This was the frst swimming pool in Clermont-Ferrand. As a result, the frst people in Clermont-Ferrand to have learnt to swim were Michelin members or their children. 40 C. VÉDRINE

Lastly, as Jean-Pierre Frey points out, it is “clear that the vocational schools set up by industrialists will mirror one of the patronage schemes aimed at organising the lives of the workers and their families, not only to supply the factory with an obedient workforce qualifed for the job but equally to ensure peace at home which is conducive to a successful school education of the children” (1995, 71*). In 1950, there were already eighteen Michelin schools for children from the age of two onwards. Two of these schools provided teaching up to the age of seventeen. One offered entrance exams for the factory’s apprenticeship school, the other an entrance exam for the company’s administrative positions. The “Mission”11 allowed boys aged ffteen to eighteen holding an elementary certifcate or a school certifcate to become perfect Michelin staff. Didn’t it teach that tyres “are a means to enhance the world”…? (Morge 2001*). After a year, students were ready to become bricklayers or lathe operators; after two years, assemblers or carpenters; and industrial designers or electricians after three years. The training of future Michelin workers and technicians had an excellent reputation. The level of education at the company schools was higher than in state schools, as a result of the students’ hard work and a strong discipline. To this day, the old Mission premises are home to a Michelin technical training school where priority is still given to the children of staff. “And so the circle closes, which from his birth in a Michelin nursery until his death when he will be taken to the cemetery in a van ft- ted with Michelin tyres, monopolising his work and his leisure, keeps the serf of this new feudal power locked up”, concludes Lavaud.12 The servitude of the paternalistic system has often been criticised, with some trade unionists even calling it “the rubber labour camp”. Before turning to the controversy around this system, the reader should remember that Michelin paternalism only ended recently as it was not until the end of the 1980s that the company started withdrawing from its social work while at the same time launching redundancy plans. Against the backdrop of economic crisis and the resulting rising unemployment, the company no longer needed to offer social advantages to fnd staff that are easily recruited and retained in a climate where job losses are a real threat. Until then, only the schools had been reluctantly abandoned to

11 Named after the building’s former religious use. 12 “Michelin ou la féodalité industrielle”, Europe, no. 111, 15 March 1932. 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 41 the State, following the May ’68 events denouncing in a public arena the paternal authority in the home and in the factories. For the people of Clermont-Ferrand, paternalism is therefore not an old story. Many traces can still be seen not only in their spatial impact but also in the political, cultural and social spheres. I will come back to this point.

2.2.3 Paternalism—Complexity and Controversy Tackling the rather controversial subject of paternalism is rather complex since it requires taking into account that the popular masses simultaneously adhere to its principles in practice while condemning their alienation, which is not wholly unfounded. The fundamental debate opposing the conservative right to the unionised left arises from the ambiguous character of the relations established by the company’s social policy between the employer and the staff. While for Marxists paternalism is an “aberration” because it stifes class struggle, it is important however to point out, as Marianne Debouzy does, that it is also “a social relations system that increases the sometimes ambiguous and conficting character of the workers-employer relations” (1988, 4*). This ambivalence is even more acute in Clermont-Ferrand as the Michelin family is genuinely driven by social Catholicism, which serves the interests of the company but also coincides with the values endorsed by the Michelin family. Reducing paternalism to a cynical management strategy makes it impossible to understand the nature of the relations between staff and leadership, no matter how ambiguous, which are at the root of the construction of a myth and a spirit. Similarly, the endorsement by employees cannot be reduced to blind self-sacrifce to the company and would fy in the face of the real benefts they enjoy and that would be hard to give up. In an unsanitary city, which is ill-equipped to accommodate the workforce of a booming company, Michelin offers a level of comfort which other Clermont-Ferrand residents sometimes envy. Many deny this envy by elevating it into political principles. Finally, there are very few who have not beneftted from at least one of the services offered by Michelin. This would also ignore paternalism’s ability to structure. Indeed, it allows offering many people a decent quality of life and a framework to their life, in both cases providing structure, even if one can argue for and against it. Lastly, if the company is an institution that can be described in several respects as “total” in the sense of Goffman, negat- ing individual autonomy through the laws and the hierarchy that govern 42 C. VÉDRINE it (Bernoux 2001), the staff, far from being confned to obedient passiv- ity, develop their own appropriation, diversion and resistance strategies. The aim is not to gloss over the infantilising effects of paternalism, to be discussed later, but to emphasise at this stage its complexity, which cannot be reduced to one single totalitarian form of control, however real. The focus here will lie on the way in which paternalism has become the key element of the company spirit, largely justifed by a new reading and a reinterpretation of the various episodes in the company’s history, which is at the source of a mythical construct. * In conclusion, the still unfolding history of the Michelin company goes hand in hand with a trans-generational memory shaping local identity. Many confne themselves to complaining nostalgically of the loss of the total care they experienced, of the disappearance of the paternalistic framework, which at times led to a partial identity loss, both individual and social. The individual and collective memories summoned in the social frameworks described by Halbwachs allow at the same time (a) to retain a form of social relation by belonging to the same professional, cultural and social community with shared life parameters, brought together under the same emblem of “Michelin the father” and subscribing to the same spirit. Being part of a shared common history and taking part in the construction of a global company and its success fuel the feeling of pride to belong to a major company; (b) to situate the common history in space and time; (c) to support narrative practices; and (d) to call upon its corollary, oblivion, which helps to justify and put diffcult moments into perspective: “When you think of all the work and the worries father Michelin must have had” (Monsieur Paris, retired worker), “There was discipline but you have to understand. With thirty thousand workers…” (Monsieur Pampi, retired worker), “Everybody was happy. The workers were happy, they had their little estate, their small garden, it was a dream. We went on our bikes, with our satchels” (Monsieur David, retired employee): the narratives blot out the arduousness of the work and the diffculties inherent to a paternalistic policy. The nostalgic discourse therefore acts as “a refex or an attempt to re-balance their relationship to the world by placing them squarely in an historic or spiritual line” (Saez 1995, 18–19*), in this case rooted in complete myth construction. 2 A MYTH BUILT ON THE MANIPULATION OF LOCAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 43

The Michelin myth is two dimensional. In the frst place, it is global, symbolising the success of a large company, represented by the Bibendum character, the carrier of imagination and symbols. This dimension is entirely disconnected from its local history and many people are unaware of its Clermont-Ferrand roots. In this context, a German student once said to me: “I was surprised to learn that Michelin was in Clermont. I always thought it was American”. In the second place, it is a global myth, based on manipulated history and memory in support of a eulogy. Transmitted by the company, the staff and their family, the myth fnds in paternalism a basis for its construction. Although the above historical overview of Michelin and the city is in many respects too brief,13 I have gathered the necessary elements to carry out an ethnological analysis of this construction.

References Bernoux, Philippe. “L’entreprise peut-elle être qualifée d’institution totale?”. In Erving Goffman et les institutions totales, ed. Charles Amourous and Alain Blanc. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 155–174, 2001. Debouzy, Marianne. “Permanence du paternalisme?” Le mouvement social, no. 144, pp. 3–16, 1988. Dietrich, Anne. Trois lieux géographiques de l’appropriation des habitants. Le cas des “cités Michelin”. Mémoire de maîtrise de géographie, UFR Blaise Pascal Clermont-Ferrand II, année universitaire 2001–2002. Dosse, François. L’histoire. Paris: Armand Colin, 2000. Frey, Jean-Pierre. Le rôle social du patronat. Du paternalisme à l’urbanisme. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995. Gueslin, André (ed.). Les hommes du pneu, Les ouvriers Michelin, à Clermont- Ferrand, de 1889 à 1940. Paris: Les Editions de l’Atelier/Les Éditions ouvrières, 1993. Gueslin, André (ed.). Les hommes du pneu, Les ouvriers Michelin (1940–1980). Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier/Les Éditions ouvrières, 1999. Lamy, Christian, and Jean-Pierre Fornaro. Michelin-ville, Le logement ouvrier de l’entreprise Michelin, 1911–1987. Nonette: Éditions créer, 1990. Le Play, Frédéric. La Réforme sociale en France. Paris: Alfred Mame et fls libraires éditeurs, tome deuxième, quatrième édition, 1872. Le Play, Fréderic. Économie sociale. Paris: Guillaumin et cie, 1891.

13 For a more detailed history of Clermont-Ferrand and Michelin, see Védrine (2015). 44 C. VÉDRINE

Morge, Raymond-Louis. Michel, Marius, Marie et les autres… Trois générations chez Michelin. Clermont-Ferrand: Éditions De Borée, 2001. Noiriel, Gérard. Longwy, immigrés et prolétaires, 1880–1980. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. Noiriel, Gérard. “Du “patronage” au “paternalisme”: la restructuration des formes de domination de la main d’œuvre ouvrière dans l’industrie métallur- gique française”. Le mouvement social, no. 144, pp. 17–35, 1988. Nora, P. Realms of Memory, Vol. 1: Conficts and Divisions. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Edited and with a Foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Rautenberg, Michel. La rupture patrimoniale. Paris: À la croisée, 2003. Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Saez, Jean-Pierre (dir). Identités, cultures et territoires. Paris: Editions Desclée de Brower, 1995. Vedrine, Corine. L’esprit du capitalisme selon Michelin. Ethnologie d’un mythe industriel. Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2015. CHAPTER 3

The Construction of a Myth

Indeed, I would suggest that both history and memory have contributed to the construction of a myth, because “as Ninian Smart has shown, a myth is a story highly charged with meaning for the people who consider it as their story […]” (Anttonen 1988, 103*). As a story about origins (Pottier 1994), the myth is designed around history as it narrates and “celebrates” the events that led to the creation of the Michelin company, but also around memory, since it draws on oral transmission on the one hand, and on the foundations of the Bibs’ collective identity on the other, through a set of “collective meanings attached to the narrated events” (op. cit., 86*). A myth can be defned as a symbolic narrative featuring a subject-hero and whose contents reveals the foundations of the rules and values embodied by the Michelin family and the company. It is symbolic to the extent that it is oral. It is subsumed into social relations and, as such, it is open to interpretation and carries a meaning. Myths about origins are therefore “narratives which, like ‘legends’, are of a foundational nature (they concern ‘the origin of things’) and are subject to belief” (op. cit., 16*). This sets them apart from other narratives, such as fairy tales for example. The myths about the Michelin company are therefore symbolic narratives about its origins and its history, which depict each successive boss as a hero whose greatness becomes an identifying trait. Thus, the myth helps to nurture the links among group members who are driven by the same “passion”, and to formulate at the same time a common

© The Author(s) 2019 45 C. Védrine, The Spirit of Capitalism According to the Michelin Company, Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96610-6_3 46 C. VÉDRINE history, and therefore a collective identity, as well as recognition, as in recognising oneself, and being grateful. It is precisely because the hero works towards deliverance, or the common good, that he is a hero. Heroes therefore “not only provide a model but make imitation a duty and thus, they become the concrete recipients and inspirers of religious or ethical behaviours” (Albert 1999, 22*). The community recognises itself in the hero and is grateful to him and, consequently, sets him as an example to be followed and seeks to emulate him. The myth therefore allows identifcation with the Michelin family who personify greatness, and exemplify and spread the word and good conduct, that is, legitimised values, rules and knowing how to behave. According to Lévi-Strauss, “myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself a part” (1992, 341). Myths allow those who construct them to justify the broad principles of the Michelin spirit by revealing the origins that legitimise the rules governing it, the philosophy according to Michelin which it conveys within the company, thus shaping daily life, the workforce and the local urban community. We are dealing with the architecture of a truly organised system, its framework consisting of an institution (the Michelin company) that establishes an entire set of standards (being a good Michelin) and values (which justify a number of privileges such as social welfare) guaranteed by the company’s founding fathers. The mythical Michelin stories make it possible to assert and, when mobilised, reassert the usefulness of a set of practices, customs, values, ways of learning, transmitting, representing, and ways of doing and being in the world. They fuel a local spirit jointly built by the company and the Clermont-Ferrand residents. When mobilised and updated during rites and ceremonies, they reaffrm a social bond. This is where writing the myth takes on an actual mythological function within the political meaning that Plato ascribed to it. “To persuade, to charm, to enrapture; that is the only policy concerning myth in the city of the philosophers” (Detienne 1986, 95). The use of myths as a political tool for persuasion purposes is described in The Republic: “The incredible becomes credible. For henceforth the law-giver knows he has the power to inculcate whatever he wants in the souls of the young” (op. cit., 96). This rather “authoritarian” vision of mythology nevertheless invites us to examine one of its intrinsic dimensions, namely belief, 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 47 which has two aspects: make believe and believe. Make believe goes hand in hand with myth creation but for a mythical narrative to be more than just an enchanting tale, it has to be believed (op. cit.). And people always have good reasons to believe (Lenclud 1990): both the staff and the people of Clermont-Ferrand endorse or accept to endorse the myth in order to be part of a game with rules, as the contents of the myth give a meaning to the world around them while justifying the rules governing it. It is precisely when the rules of the game become exclusively economic and political and the values essentially capitalist that the members of the Michelin company no longer believe the myths, describing the narratives as vague, if not false, regarding the historic reality of the sequence of events that are recounted. Deconsecration, as discussed in the third section, starts once recognition and gratitude modes are undermined. For now, I will consider reifed versions of the myth, as well as company rites and ceremonies during which the narratives are mobilised.

3.1 overview of the Body of Narratives, Structure and Classification

3.1.1 Background and Themes The mythical Michelin narratives are produced and conveyed orally and in writing. As far as oral transmission is concerned, the prime source is the company itself, that is, the leadership and those in charge of communication. The second source are the staff and their spouses, thus refecting the interconnection between areas of work and outside work. The third are the people of Clermont-Ferrand who contribute to deepening and disseminating the narratives, and making them successful. These narratives transmit mythical events in individual speech, expressing frst-hand experience, perceptions or even a reading already contained in the written versions. That is why it would be impossible to track and map them. Two essential points stand out from these narratives. The frst point involves the contribution of the Michelin company to both local and global growth through its input in technology and the global economy. Michelin appears as a demiurge, the creator of a new world, the automobile world. In this sense, we are dealing with a true cosmogony in that a new world is created and is evolving. The second 48 C. VÉDRINE point is the stellar success of a small factory thanks to the values of what will later become the “Michelin spirit”. There are four main narrative sources and four transmission modes. The frst is reading written texts, reclaimed and narrated to relatives of the reader, whether a Michelin staff member or living in Clermont, and then disseminated within each of their own work and social areas. The second concerns the involvement of the veterans in one of the mythical events that have been relayed from one generation to another. Family and social memories become the carriers of the experience of a forebear or former colleague, by now elderly or deceased. Stories starting with “My grandfa ther told me…”, “The father of a colleague was there and his son clearly says that…”, etc. are transmitted on the one hand to the younger genera tions of families and staff, and to the people of Clermont-Ferrand on the other. The third is direct testimony, where the witness himself is an agent of transmission to both his family and members of staff, and to the local population. These types of narrative are contained in a space-time of their own. The events in question took place during the employee’s career and within his specifc work areas. Here, we leave the time of the century-old company in favour of human time. The last source corresponds to the speeches by the Michelin family member managing the company, given during the medal award ceremony ritual rewarding the longest-serving employees. Passed on directly to the gathered staff and their spouses, these narratives are subsequently indirectly relayed to the people of Clermont- Ferrand. It is worth noting that these speeches are also transmitted in writing since they are printed in the company’s internal newsletter. Regarding the contents of the second and third narrative sources, these concern direct experience, which when narrated confrms and sub- stantiates the myths but by the same token stakes the witness’ claim that he is part of the “Michelin spirit”. And this proof applies to both the recipient of the narrative and the narrator himself: the Michelin spirit is reasserted within the company by and for the employees, and later in the outside world to the local population. However, not all the actors are keepers of the mythical stories. Only the leadership and the authors of various writings are, without fully realising it. In addition, whether oral or written, the sources complement each other. Whereas the oral narrators refer to their own experience, to what they have been told, to what has been written, the authors refer to each other. The internal productions, however, either oral and written, do not claim any source. 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 49

Furthermore, the four narration and transmission modes concern the families (spouses and children) of Michelin staff. The family is the most exposed and receptive target of the effects of myth construction. The staunchest believers of the Michelin myth are undeniably women and, as a result, they are clearly the best narrators of its constituent stories. Spouses or employees, they are the most loyal supporters of the mythical Michelin system. Those who have known the company’s social welfare provision were part and parcel of the welfare system for the workforce, which regulated, framed and governed not only their private life, but also their family and social life. Unlike their husbands who had access to the factory’s den and to the reality and arduousness of the work, their only support in terms of giving meaning to their lives were these narratives, which they related to. Especially as the company fosters a culture of secrecy encouraging spouses not to talk about their work. This is why the women have frequently fuelled the whole imaginary side of the narratives linked to mythical stories, defning in the process their relation to a company they were never involved with. The children are a slightly different case. In particular through school and summer camps, they had to face a reality, which some of them fully adjusted to by later becoming Michelin members of staff, while others broke away from it by fnding employment outside the world of tyres. As far as written materials are concerned, at the time of my investigation, there were eleven publications written by twelve authors with different profles.1 Six types of writer stand out: the witness, the independent journalist, the journalist in the service of the company, the Michelin communications department, the biographer and the academic. Among these texts, two authors represent the fgure of the witness: Antoine Barrière and Raymond Louis Morge. Their respective books, both published in the area of Clermont-Ferrand, take the form of a testimony, as expressed by their titles: Michelin vu de l’intérieur. Ce que j’ai vécu de 1950 à 1961. Témoignage de vie ouvrière [Inside Michelin. A worker’s Life Between 1950 and 1961] (Barrière 1983) and Michel, Marius, Marie et les autres… Trois générations chez Michelin [Michel, Marius, Marie and the Others… Three Generations at Michelin] (Morge

1 Since then and as far as I can tell, at least another eleven works have been written about the company, most of them following Édouard Michelin’s death. 50 C. VÉDRINE

2001). Michel, Marius et Marie are the grandparents and parents of Morge who belongs to the “others” himself. Three independent journalists have taken an interest to the Michelin company. Alain Jemain’s (1982) history of the company was published under the title Un siècle de secrets [A Century of Secrets]. Pol Echevin, a former Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne [Young Christian Workers] member and trade unionist, is the author of Échec au roi. Charles Tissier, 40 ans de combats [Check! Charles Tissier—40 Years of Struggle] (1985). Finally, Michel Dufourt (2000) published an activist booklet, Le vrai scandale Michelin, [The Real Michelin Scandal] concerning “the Michelin case”. Two books, written by journalists, take a slightly different approach. The frst book, Le grand siècle de Bibendum [The Michelin Man—100 Years of Bibendum] by Olivier Darmon (1997), was commissioned by the company to mark 100 years of Bibendum. The foreword was drafted by the three joint managers at the time, Édouard Michelin, François Michelin and René Zingraff, and the book was distributed to the Michelin employees, thus offcially endorsing its contents. The book Et pourquoi pas? [And Why Not?] is a transcript of an interview that François Michelin gave in 1998 to Ivan Levaï, then managing editor of the fnancial newspaper La Tribune, and Yves Messarovitch, managing director within the media group Expansion. In it François Michelin sets out his philosophy, well-known to his employees, and his economic, political and religious views. These works simultaneously uphold the offcial versions of the mythical stories and the laudatory and fascinated discourse about the company’s history on the one hand, and the “most reserved, the least media-oriented of French top executives” (Levaï et al. 2003, xii) on the other. Another fgure emerges from the bibliography about Michelin, namely the biographer Herbert R. Lottman, author of The Michelin Men: Driving an Empire (2003). Lottman is fascinated, even impressed, yet ironical and at times cynical. The acknowledgements at the beginning of the book highlight the challenges for any author venturing in the Manufactory’s footsteps: “Perhaps it was a good thing after all that the author had to write about Michelin without the help of Michelin. One is always uncomfortable with the notion of publishing an authorized history, a book which calls for the co-operation of the subject, for readers can wonder whether they are reading a less objective book because of the authorization and the co-operation. Be assured. Michelin in Clermont- Ferrand answered no questions. Even the date of birth of the second 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 51

Edouard Michelin, who was soon to succeed his father as head of the family enterprise, was not obtainable from the company. […] It made the job more interesting”. Some scholars, historians and geographers have shown interest in L’épopée Bibendum, une entreprise à l’épreuve de l’histoire [The Bibendum Saga—A Company That Stood the Test of Time] (2002), to quote the title by historian Lionel Dumond. I should point out that all these researchers are either from Clermont-Ferrand, like Dumond, or teaching at one of the Clermont-Ferrand universities. This is the case of historian Annie Moulin-Bourret, now deceased, and André Gueslin, former teacher in Clermont-Ferrand and nowadays professor of social history at the University of Paris VII-Jussieu. Despite this brief overview of these authors, it is fair to say that local authors (academics, witnesses, representatives and managers of and people responsible for the company), national authors (journalists) and international authors (biographer) stand out. So do the views from the inside (workers who witnessed and François Michelin),2 from the outside (journalists and academics3), and the views produced inside (offcial versions drawn up by the communications department). It is therefore on the basis of this literature that I have sought to map the body of mythical narratives. Although writing can go at the cost of variation, this has not been the case here, far from it. Each version of a particular episode fully accounts for its origins and circumstances. Since the written word is the most commonly used means to spread myths, I will analyse the quasi-constructed stories, for those within the company, in the political sense highlighted by Plato.

3.1.2 Narrative Structure and Typology If we defne myths as stories about the origin and drawing on Pottier’s above-mentioned earlier, I have identifed sixteen narratives matching sixteen episodes in the company’s history. Two types of myth emerge,

2 It is worth pointing out that, to this day, no company executive has published a testimony. 3 Academic papers by university students should be added to this (as mentioned in the bibliography) but as they have not been published, they have not contributed to the construction of the myth. 52 C. VÉDRINE namely founding myths and myths that explain, if not justify, the precepts of a spirit. The arrival of the Michelin family in Auvergne, for example, belongs to the founding myths, while the individual portraits of each dynastic fgure feed the Michelin spirit. For this reason, despite the term “founding” used to qualify the “fathers”, in my view the narratives concerning them rather belong to the second category (Fig. 3.1). Together, the various elements of the narrative body make a system. Structural lines can be identifed, with variations and constant elements, given that each story supports various narratives. It is therefore important to distinguish between form and substance as the vocabulary used varies according to the position of the narrator. “Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells”, writes Lévi-Strauss (1963, 210—emphasis in original). Therefore, “if there is a meaning to be found in mythology, it cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined”. Just as “there is no single ‘true’ version of which all the others are but copies or distortions. Every version belongs to the myth” (op. cit., 218). Classifying and carrying out a semantic analysis of the mythical stories will shed light on the system governing them. Not all versions will be examined for each episode, as the main focus will be on the structure of the narrative as revealed by their analysis. Yet, by presenting a number of versions, it will be possible to compare discursive variations according to the narrator and to highlight the reasons underpinning the narratives. The episodes are analysed in narrative order, coinciding with either a particular moment in time, or with a character’s comment, action, appearance, exit or description. However, I will not describe each episode here. For a detailed presentation and analysis of each individual episode, see Védrine (2015).

3.2 introduction and Analysis of the Narratives

3.2.1 The Founding Narratives A founding mythology is “a narrative that puts one in a few words in front of the current origins of the social and cosmic order, and that enti- tles each and everyone to do what they are doing in society. Myths create order” (Godelier 1997, 32*). The eleven founding stories can be divided 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 53

16 narratives

5 11 stories revealing founding stories the Michelin spirit

2 stories concerning the 5 creation stories company’s values The creation of rubber General de Gaulle’s visit The creation of the removable Sacrificing Le Cormier tyre The creation of the radial tyre The creation of Bibendum The creation of the Red Guide 3 stories about the founding fathers Édouard, the benevolent 3 salvation stories André, the advertisement genius The salvation of the family François, the embodiment of the business spirit The salvation of the region The salvation of the Citroën business

3 challenge stories The Paris-Brest-Paris race The Paris-Clermont-Ferrand race The Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race

Fig. 3.1 Overall structure of the mythical Michelin system 54 C. VÉDRINE into three categories: creation stories (5), salvation stories (3), and challenge stories (3).

3.2.1.1 The Creation Stories The creation stories portray Michelin as a true demiurge. Inventiveness, ingenuity, technology and know-how are fully harnessed to boost the new civilisation of cars as promoted by Michelin, one of its main creators. It is not so much about the invention of new tyre technology as about the contribution to the global technological and economic momentum through the creation of a new and globalised automobile world. This process is recounted in fve stories covering (1) the arrival of rubber in the small Daubrée sugar refnery; (2) the invention of the removable tyre based on the repair of Dunlop’s invention of the tyre. One of the roles of myths is to make a distinction between good and evil and to organise the world between allies and enemies, which the liberat- ing forces can and must combat. This episode features Michelin’s main competitor at the time. It can therefore name the enemy and the danger that must be fought with constantly renewed inventiveness. Indeed, the fgure of the competitor is evil incarnate given that it puts the company’s continuity at risk and challenges its ability to innovate, diversify, become global and secure client loyalty. The client soon becomes a very important fgure for the business and is at the heart of the values of the frm; (3) the creation of the radial tyre; (4) the creation of a system for assessing hotels and restaurants through the Red Guide; and (5) the creation of Bibendum, which I will describe below.

The Founding Story of Bibendum I will focus on the versions by Jemain and Darmon, which illustrate the narration of this episode. To start with, the story showing the two Michelin brothers is placed in context, in terms of both space and time. The most widespread and widely adopted version, as related by Darmon, claims that the idea of Bibendum was born when Édouard spotted a suggestive stack of tyres. By contrast, Jermain’s story questions the source of the idea and highlights the controversy surrounding it. He emphasises the doubtful identity of the man who conceived of this now world-famous little fellow. With a short narrative thread, it draws on rather unspecifed elements. On the one hand, the two versions oppose the sentence “Looking for an original way of presenting the company’s products, the organiser of 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 55 the Michelin stand had placed two piles of tyres at the entrance” to the object “a stack of tyres”, and on the other hand the adverbial phrase of place “the Universal and Colonial Exhibition in Lyons” to the more unspecifc “an exhibition in Lyons”.

Darmon’s version (1998, 22–25): [Stage 1] One day in 1894 the two Michelin brothers were visiting the Universal and Colonial Exhibition in Lyons. Looking for an original way of presenting the company’s products, the organiser of the Michelin stand had placed two piles of tyres at the entrance. Edouard pointed to them and said to his brother: “Look at that. Add some arms, and you’d say they were men.” [Stage 2] A short time later, André was visited by the graphic artist O’Galop. One of the advertising designs the artist had to show him portrayed, in caricature, a fgure resem- bling Gambrinus, the king who, it is said, invented beer-brewing. It showed his outsize silhouette seated at a table, holding up a fagon of beer and exclaiming in Latin: “Nunc est bibendum” – Now is the time to drink! The design, which O’Galop had unsuccessfully offered to a Munich brewery, set off a chain of associations in André’s mind, linking the pot-bellied drinker of the drawing with the human shape Edouard had detected in the pile of tyres. The character seemed ideal. [Stage 3] The expression ‘Nunc est bibendum’ came from an ode by the ancient Roman poet Horace, and had been attributed to Mark Antony, Cleopatra’s ally at the naval defeat at Actium, in Greece, in the year 31 B.C. André decided to keep the reference since for him it evoked the memory of a phrase he had used while giving a talk to the Society of Civil Engineers some time before. In the course of a demonstration of the shock-absorption capacity of the infatable tyre, he had concluded with this metaphor: “The pneumatic tyre drinks up obstacles”. With this formula on the one hand, and the link between the rotund drinker and the piles of tyres on the other, André reckoned that somewhere in there he had a winner. [Stage 4] But how were these elements to be brought together? How could he make them work as a publicity image? O’Galop scribbled and sketched away and came up with a little round man made of tyres, holding not a glass of beer but a mug full of nails and pieces of glass. 56 C. VÉDRINE

Thus was ‘Nunc est bibendum’ translated somewhat freely into ‘The tyre that drinks up obstacles’. [Stage 5] And so in April 1898 the ‘Michelin Man’ was born in a series of posters which rapidly became famous, as famous and as familiar as the jovial character the French still call Bibendum’. […] A month later, that July, competitor Léon Théry saw André Michelin driving up in his Panhard-Levassor to attend the Paris-Amsterdam-Paris race, and exclaimed: “Hey, here comes Bibendum!” Michelin was so amused that he decided on the spot to appropriate the name for his publicity mascot. Jemain’s version (1982, 57*): [Stage 1] Since the 1898 Motor Show, the company has acquired a mascot: Bibendum, the little man made of tyres. “I’m the father”, said Édouard, claiming that he had an epiph- any about it whilst walking with his brother through an exhibition in Lyons and seeing a stack of tyres. “Not so”, retorted André, alleging to have imagined it after seeing a draft poster depicting a jolly rotund beer drinker lifting a pint. [Stage 2] “Certainly not, it was me and me alone”, protested the O’Galop designer, one of the most famous cartoonists at that time who had been entrusted by the Michelin brothers to design one of the very frst company posters. [Stage 3] This poster used the same slo- gan devised by André Michelin in 1893 and which contributed to the brand’s fame: “Nunc est bibendum”. [Now is the time for drinking. [Stage 4] Implying the obstacle.] [Stage 5] One thing is certain: the jolly chubby fellow […] was named in July 1898 at the end of the Paris-Amsterdam-Paris race when the racing champion Léon Théry cheekily adressed André Michelin with “Here comes Bibendum”. The onlookers were highly amused and Michelin, always on the lookout, instantly found the perfect formula.

Stage 2 involves the third character in this episode, the designer from O’Galop. Jemain portrays him as the possible inventor of Bibendum, whose outline sketch had been turned down by another company. He may have paved the way for André Michelin to consider realising 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 57 something that was still only an idea for his brother. This is the most popular version. It gives two separate roles to the two brothers who, together or in partnership, were behind the creation of Bibendum. The two parents-to-be call on third parties to help them bring their offspring into the world. Taking this analogy further, the parental roles can be assigned as follows: Édouard provided the paternal seed, while André, like a mother, carried and brought the child into the world. Édouard’s contribution to the creation of Bibendum is signifcant for the construction of this mythical episode. It seems it is the only invention to which he would have really contributed directly without the help of a team or a worker, unlike his brother who is said to be the author of a considerable number of inventions, including the Red Guide. Also, Édouard’s fathering role is not a coincidence since he is the one responsible for introducing paternalistic management in the company and the frst in the dynasty to be called “father” Michelin. Between Édouard, André et O’Galop, the three characters of this episode, André Michelin is ultimately the key protagonist of the unfolding story and its conclusion. Indeed, Stage 3 narrates the birth of the use of the Latin phrase Nunc est bibendum used by the designer in his frst sketch. André Michelin will keep the phrase, which to his mind echoes his own remark about the properties of the tyre that “drinks up obstacles”. At this stage of the narrative, Stage 4 shows how the little fellow made of tyres took ownership of the Latin reference and was baptised [Stage 5]. One last character, the racing cyclist Léon Théry, specifcally mentioned by name because of his role as the godfather: he gives André a nickname that will be bequeathed to the character on a series of posters that are already familiar. To understand the process of how the character came to be named “Bibendum”, the easiest is to divide it into six stages. Stage 1: the designer O’Galop hijacks and takes ownership of an excerpt from a political ode by Horace and lends the Latin phrase “nunc est bibendum” to a character raising his glass on a poster advertising an alco- holic drink. Stage 2: the sketch that was initially rejected by its intended recipient is reclaimed by André Michelin who achieves three things: (a) the expression “Nunc est bibendum”, translated as “Now is the time to drink” [maintenant il faut boire] is chosen as it echoes the metaphor “the tyre 58 C. VÉDRINE drinks up obstacles”; (b) “Now is the time to drink” implies a semantic reading, that is, the absorption properties of the tyre implied by “obstacles”; and (c) André Michelin substitutes the beer drinker for the character made of tyres, and the contents of the glass for sharp and threatening objects, such as nails and broken glass. Stage 3: the cyclist Léon Théry calls out to André Michelin using a metonymy: the conjugated verb “Bibendum” is chosen to refer one of the representatives of the Michelin company. This assumes knowledge of the poster, by now widely circulated, re-cognition and identifcation of André Michelin and his position, and combining the two elements to give the name “Bibendum” to Michelin. But to make a name for oneself also means gaining a reputation… When Léon Théry says “Hey, here comes Bibendum!”, he operates not only a metonymic shift but also changes a conjugated verb into a proper noun. The Latin action verb bibere is borrowed to coin a new word. The verb, which expresses a process—in this case, drinking—becomes a noun naming a subject. This metonymy is therefore symbolic in a linguistic sense, in that it signs, names or rather nick-names a subject. Stage 4: André Michelin bequeaths his nickname to the so far name- less character made of tyres, making a metaphor out of the previous metonymy. However, this in turn produces another shift, from the conjugated verb “bibendum”, which is part of a sentence uttered by the character, to the character himself. Thus, the signifer “Bibendum” is no longer a verb but a proper noun, losing in the process its original, often unknown, meaning. This is precisely where Stage 5 starts. The signifer Bibendum acquires a capital letter but at the same time it no longer needs to be written out. The character is now recognised as Bibendum. There is no need to write his name out and his name disappears from the advertising posters. From actant to being, Bibendum now absolutely is. And his consistency is conveyed by his bulk and ever-growing bonhomie. The fnal stage is not included in this narrative but it is worth mentioning it as it completes the semantic loop that I have tried to unfold. It concerns an abbreviating metonymy, as shown in the name “Bib” that refers to Michelin employees and denotes belonging to the same company (the plural is Bibs). Tracing the origin of this nickname is diffcult but it is clear that it deals with belonging, identity, and company spirit or culture. Although the noun “Bib” is the result of a metonymy, it acts as 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 59 a metaphor and symbol for a dynamic of inclusion in/exclusion from a system. In conclusion, the story behind the creation of the Bibendum character narrates the process leading to the birth of the Michelin re-presentative. Indeed, “what is re-presenting, if not presenting anew (in the modality of time) or in the place of (in the modality of space)? The prefx re- introduces into the term the value of substitution”, writes Marin (1988, 5). The character-ambassador Bibendum has now been invested with the power to be everywhere at once.

3.2.1.2 The Salvation Stories The saviour of the Michelin company and, by the same token or through metonymy, of the eponymous dynasty is portrayed in three mythical stories, corresponding to three types of salvation and deliverance, which have required certain sacrifces from the Michelin family. We are dealing with the fgure of the hero. As pointed out by Jean-Pierre Albert (1988), the hero meets the moral requirement of serving the common interest and the conditions under which he carries out his duty must be tough, if not dangerous. Furthermore, these forms of rescue indebt those res- cued who can be identifed as: (1) the farmers and winegrowers of the Auvergne region hit by phylloxera, who have come to Michelin to fnd work; (2) the Citroën company, which was saved from bankruptcy; and (3) the family company Daubrée et Barbier, which will be described in detail below.

The Story of the Salvation of the Family Business The episode about the rescue of the business involves a double sacrifce: by Édouard Michelin who is forced to leave Paris, and by his aunt (Aristide Barbier’s daughter) who risks all her savings to support her young nephew in this rescue mission. Regarding Édouard Michelin’s departure to Clermont-Ferrand, I will rely on the versions by Darmon and Jemain, which are illustrative for all the written materials. Signifcantly the rescue operation coincides with the renaming of the family company after its saviour, Michelin, the name it will carry from then on. Since, in Durkheim’s words, “the totem is a name frst of all […], an emblem” (Durkheim 1964, 110), Michelin’s emblem is born at that moment. 60 C. VÉDRINE

Darmon’s version (1998, 12): [Stage 1a] “Master”, he [Édouard Michelin] told his artistic men- tor, “my duty now is to go to Clermont to save the family frm from ruin. [Stage 2] Though it pains me to renounce my art, I have thought it over at great length and I see where my duty lies. [Stage 1b] Bouguereau was no less pained to lose a disciple who, he said later, “paints like a pig but draws like an angel”. [Stage 3] He must have been hoping secretly that Edouard would fail to adjust to life in the provinces. Jemain’s version (1982, 25*): [Stage 3] “Go and sort the business out and come back to your artwork.” [Stage 1b] Bouguereau, the great Bouguereau, one of the leading offcial painters – he is an Institute member and chairman of the Salon jury – does not like to see his students go. Art – with a capital A – does not accept good causes or poor excuses. [Stage 1a] When Édouard Michelin, late 1888, tells him that he is leaving the studio to take over a small provincial factory at his brother’s request, [stage 3] the master hopes that it will be a short-lived getaway. So does Édouard. [Stage 2] He is not exactly thrilled to try and avoid the collapse of the business set up by his cousin Édouard Daubrée and his grandfather Aristide Barbier. The year is 1888, preparations are underway for the Universal Exhibition commemorating the Storming of the Bastille and the capital attracts the elegance and intelligence from all four continents. Forsaking Paris for a cloistered life in Auvergne is not easy or pleasant.

Three stages can be identifed in the two stories arising from the family decision to send Édouard Michelin to Clermont-Ferrand, because his brother André had no desire to give up his work as an architect and a locksmith. Insofar as neither author has any indication as to how the elder brother was convinced to leave Paris, the frst stage opens directly with Édouard Michelin announcing his decision to leave to one of his tutors at the École des Beaux-Arts. This is why it takes the form of a dialogue. The 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 61 fgure embodying the person notifed of Édouard’s departure deserves our attention [Stage 1a]. He is not, as the reader may reasonably expect, one of Édouard’s family members but his “master” or tutor, or, as it were, a member of his spiritual family. Choosing to involve this character is symbolically signifcant as it allows [Stage 1b] to establish the social position of the future company director through his tutor’s standing [status] as strongly emphasised by Jemain (“the great Bouguereau”, “one of the leading offcial painters”, “Institute member”, “chairman of the Salon jury”). The author shows how demanding he is with his students (“Art – with a capital A – does not accept good causes or poor excuses”), and how much Édouard respects him, preferring to address him as “master” rather than “tutor”. As a result, the narrative feeds the myth built around Édouard Michelin: the art training of the man who will become one of the major captains of industry in France highlights qualities such as sensitivity and inspiration, but also the achievement of having become, without prior training, education or interest in the industrial sector, the saviour and later the head of a rubber company. The following stage recounts what Édouard Michelin renounced and sacrifced. Both attitudes are inspired by a sense of duty, a value conveyed throughout these narratives. Whereas Darmon puts words in Édouard Michelin’s mouth, such as “It pains me” but it is “my duty” “to save” “the family frm”, Jemain portrays the Parisian context (preparations for the Universal Exhibition), which the young Beaux-Arts student is about to give up to resign himself (“not exactly thrilled”, “not easy or pleasant”) to a “cloistered life” (like a friar) in Auvergne, contrasting Parisian cultural wealth (“and the capital attracts the elegance and intelligence from all four continents”) with provincial poverty, the backdrop to the “ruin” of the “family frm”. Finally, the last stage emphasises that Édouard’s move is sacrifcial, as shown by the hope of coming back. His return is anticipated, both by his tutor (the narrative highlights his interest for the student who “paints like a pig but draws like a angel”, the conjunction “but” insisting on the abilities of the young artist who resigns himself to forsake the work his “master” encourages and fnds promising) and by Édouard Michelin (“so does Édouard”), as his mission, described as a “getaway”, is expected to be short. Renouncing, sacrifce and duty are the values put forward in this episode, narrated entirely on the basis of conjecture, including the wholly imaginary dialogues. 62 C. VÉDRINE

3.2.1.3 The Challenge Stories The last three episodes of the creation stories belong to the “challenge” category as they recount both the challenge of inventing the removable tyre and the evidence of its effectiveness through taking part in cycling and car races 1891 and 1895 (Paris-Brest-Paris, Paris-Clermont-Ferrand, and Paris-Bordeaux-Paris). For a detailed analysis of these three narratives, see Védrine (2015). They mark the beginning of how popular the races would become among Michelin staff. Sporting events remain the company’s undisputed showcase but also a source of pride for the Bibs who cheer their employer’s performances or bemoan, and even mock any lack of success. Like a barometer, competitions are a foolproof way of testing a product’s performance and, as a result, the company’s credibility.

3.2.2 The Stories Illustrating the Michelin Spirit These narratives reveal the lines of conduct and thinking models guiding and structuring the behavioural skills of anyone belonging to Michelin and endowed with the company spirit. By uncovering values and laws, myths serve as examples to be followed. Among the fve episodes identifed as mythical narratives, two categories can be distinguished. Two episodes reveal the company’s values whereas the three other stories profle the founding fathers, the guaran- tors of the Michelin spirit.

3.2.2.1 The Stories Conveying the Company Values “An object is sacred because it inspires, in one way or another, a collective sentiment of respect which removes it from profane touches”, writes Durkheim (1964, 265–266). Sacredness rules and the religious discourse make it possible for the guarantor of the rules to impose them, together with a framework and a line of conduct dictating who he is and what he has to do. This is how the entire Michelin system should be seen and understood, and mythological construction is part and parcel of this system. This confers a sacred dimension to the set of values advocated and transmitted through mythical narratives. In the frst category, we fnd the narratives extolling the sacred dimension of Duty, Dedication, Example Setting, Savings and Secrecy. The story selected here has been used on many occasions and is undoubtedly the most well known by the media. 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 63

The Story of General De Gaulle’s Visit This episode narrates General de Gaulle’s visit to the factories in Clermont-Ferrand to congratulate the tyre manufacturer for his acts of resistance during the war. When France was occupied, Michelin refused a German stake in its capital in exchange for artifcial rubber that would have compensated for the growing shortfall of raw material. In order to deal with the rubber shortage, the company chose to diversify its production instead (shoe soles, raincoats, bicycle trailer), while in 1943, by choice or not—this is still open to debate—Michelin engineers produced tyres for the Wehrmacht struggling with low temperatures in the East. This episode is certainly the most well known and the most widespread in Clermont-Ferrand that justifes Michelin’s policy of secrecy, to the extent of causing a considerable controversy among local historians, continuing to this day, who have analysed photographs and stories in minute detail. This controversy concerns both versions: according to one, General de Gaulle was granted access to the factory workshops while the other claims that he was denied access to the work foor. This controversy alone illustrates the mythical scope of this story, as exemplifed in the two versions by Jemain and Morge.

Jemain’s version (1982, 125*): Late 1944, the Michelin family’s exemplary behaviour earns them a visit from General de Gaulle. The head of the provisional government, accompanied by the Sultan of Morocco Mohammed V and approximately ffteen offcials, all listening to a presentation by Robert Puiseux, shakes hands around him but he too fails to go through the workshop door. Morge’s version (2001, 215*): On 30 June 1945, General De Gaulle visited for the frst time a factory in a part of liberated France, Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand. Accompanied by the Sultan of Morocco, Mr. Lacoste, Minister of Industrial Production, and Mr. Mayer, Minister of Public Works and Transportation, he was welcomed by Mr. Puiseux at the Cataroux factory. Whilst going through a number of workshops and streets, he could ascertain how quickly the factory had been rebuilt, in view of the photographs he had been shown, taken after the bombing. 64 C. VÉDRINE

After crossing the area by car, he was taken to the main factory of Les Carmes where he visited the preparation and heating workshop of the Department O. At midday, a curious and enthusiastic crowd of employees listened to his address and sang a rousing Marseillaise with him. It was a very emotional and proud day for the entire staff of the frm.”

We can distinguish three stages: (1) General de Gaulle’s visit to congratulate the Michelin company for its exemplary conduct during the Second World War; (2) identifying the people accompanying the General and the man welcoming him (Puiseux); and (3) the illustration of the historical controversy surrounding the General’s access to the workshops. This story brings frst of all example setting to the fore [Stage 1]. Michelin is presented as the chosen one, “selected” to exemplify good conduct. The ceremonial and formal character of the event is foregrounded by the prestigious titles [Stage 2] of those in attendance (“head of the provisional government”, “Sultan”, “offcials”, “Ministers”). This prestige has a ripple effect on the company: by standing for good conduct, it enjoys the attention of high-ranking offcials. Although both authors agree on the narrative of both sequences, the latter invites the reader to draw a slightly different conclusion. Jemain’s story ends with the notion of secrecy, dear to the company, insisting on the fact that it was made impossible for the General to access the workshops, thus highlighting and justifying the Michelin spirit. For his part, Morge, from his position as a witness, chooses the alternative version that is endorsed by only a few people in Clermont-Ferrand. He ends his narrative in an almost patriotic tone (“rousing Marseillaise”, “very emotional”, “proud”, “frm”), refecting his pride to have worked for a company that is so deservedly recognised by the offcial bodies and institutions answerable to the law. The former Michelin employee is without a doubt the only author to offer this version without mentioning the controversy, as if to quell any doubt. Yet it is Jemain’s version that is known and told and retold by the employees, the people of Clermont- Ferrand, the Town Council staff and both local and national journalists to epitomise the Michelin spirit. I would go as far as saying that supporting Morge’s version would amount to an act of demystifying the company. It would indeed lose one of the main supports vital for justifying the way it operates to preserve its culture, the source of its success. This 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 65 explains to a great extent why the mystery surrounding General de Gaulle’s visit has been cultivated.

3.2.2.2 The Stories About the Founding Fathers There are three founding fathers: Édouard, André and François Michelin. The frst two gave their name to the company, and the third one symbolises continuity. In addition, Édouard and François Michelin are recognised as “fathers” since that is what they are called. Although Puiseux, a son-in-law of the family, was in charge of managing the company for a while, he has never been considered as belonging to the category of fathers as his role was always seen as temporary. Puiseux is viewed as the link connecting Édouard’s departure and André, followed by the return of a Michelin (François) at the head of the company. The emphasis on handing over to, if not ftting Édouard’s son-in-law into preserve the name, is conveyed both by the written materials where he is only occasionally mentioned, and by the stories from the locals who seldom refer to him, despite the fact that many retired employees knew him. Like Boulanger and Durin, who never appear in orally transmitted stories, he is missing from the stories of which he nevertheless is the main character. One example is the previous episode about the visit of General de Gaulle. Although the narratives note that at that time he was managing the company, the oral stories never mention this, merely stating that “Even General de Gaulle couldn’t get in at Michelin”. Lastly, the last man with the Michelin surname who has inherited his great-grandfather’s frst name, Édouard Michelin, is not referred to as “father” but as “son of”. He is “the son” of François Michelin or rather “son of father Michelin”. He only has a place in legend because of his name, which signifes family continuation and dynastic sense. Also, before his tragic death, Édouard Michelin represented the son who had to prove himself, generating rumours and concerns because he stood for change, as the company had just relinquished its paternalistic policy. In short, he concluded and formed the triad on which the Michelin history and myth are built, taking the position of the son next to the father and the spirit. I will come back to this. The name establishes the place assigned to the “fathers”, yet, albeit necessary, it is not enough. The name has to be linked to a power shining through the role and charisma of the characters. They are the foundation of a symbolic and imaginary system and vouch for the myth and belief it entails. In other words, the power embodied by the mythical characters provides belief with a symbolic object, which gives 66 C. VÉDRINE the founding fathers an almost totemic role. The totem “Michelin”, in Durkheim’s terms (1964), is the clan’s fag, with the totemic principle symbolising moral strength and, beyond that, respect. We are therefore witnessing a process whereby the living are sanctifed through the mys- tifcation of existing fgures who have become mythical characters, feeding the imagination. Through this action, the elements handled by these characters (and the spoken word is a particularly important one) become sacred in turn. Since one of the main role of myths is to give meaning to the world, its creation is assigned to the divine creator who is made responsible for order in what he has created. He holds simultaneously the answer, the key to the riddles and the power to change the course of things. It is precisely the symbolic relation to this heroic creator that helps fostering the social link between people connected by the same feeling towards the same identifcation point. It should be noted that the dynamic of recognising and not recognising individuals or groups as being part of the same community also relies on this identity construction. In essence, the myth brings together human groups that recognise each other as belonging to the same system of belief in and devotion to one single heroic fgure. Édouard, André and François Michelin carry the same moral values. Their portraits show that they are not merely “fathers” vouching for the law and its enforcement, but also Holy patrons who protect the members of their chapel. Thus, Édouard embodies the fatherly benevolence underpinning paternalism. The stories portray him both as the man who temporarily sacrifced his career at the École des Beaux-Arts and as the assertive, recognised and famous industrialist. His older brother André Michelin is the fgure symbolising creativity and communication through organising races and air competitions, actively involved in the birth of Bibendum, creating accordion folding maps, road marking, village nameplates, the Red Guide, etc. In other words, whereas his brother represents the inside of the factory and its organisation, André, with a broader vision of the automobile world, is its ambassador and promoter. Following engineering studies at the École d’Ingénieurs Centrale, he enrols at the Beaux-Arts to study architecture. After a stint as deputy head at the French Map Department of the Interior Ministry, he sets up his own company designing funerary hardware and steel framing. He is therefore not very keen to leave Paris as he is well-established profession- ally. This explains why he insists that his younger brother, still a student, 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 67 go to Clermont-Ferrand instead. In painting André Michelin’s portrait, the authors are keen to emphasise his training and professional career to explain his interest in road marking and numbering, and creating road maps. His business thinking follows an ingenious logic and strategy: developing an automobile culture will ensure that the Michelin company is successful. Attention must be paid to the needs of drivers who, far from being merely road users, are advertising targets, be it as head of the family, avid sports fan, consumer, salesman, tourist, etc. The seeds are sown of what will become one of Michelin’s fundamental values at the root of its business philosophy: listening to and respecting customers. Regardless of the way the narratives are structured, André Michelin is always depicted as the thinker and creator of the automobile world. “He’s the one who” sums up the different stories written about him, according to which the Michelin company conceived of an era in which today everyone is an actor. This makes André Michelin’s inventions even more signifcant as they concern all citizens, both users and actors in the automobile world entirely conceived and designed from scratch by the Michelin frm. Lastly, Édouard’s grandson, François Michelin, is not seen as a creator but rather as the protector of the Michelin spirit. Despite being the drive behind the company’s globalisation, he is more of a symbol of the culture of his company, of which he is both the national and international ambassador. His reputation, spread wide and fed by the media, makes the myth he embodies global, especially as this myth was alive until April 2015. François Michelin is by far the most fascinating member of the dynasty and the most described one. This is because until 2001 he represented the company while employing 200,000 people but also, and above all, because, despite his important position in the global economy, he remains, in the words of the press, “the most reserved top executive in France”. To which some locals happily add “the most austere”, while to others he is “the stingiest”. The stories about him reveal his simplicity and his anonymous professional training in the workshops. Far from the stereotypes describing captains of industry, François Michelin arrives at the company to do his shift, thus showing: (1) continuity with his grandfather as a hands-on man; (2) knowledge of the factories, the workshops and the workers’ jobs, gleaned from a pragmatic approach; (3) that it was impossible for staff to accuse their employer of being unfamiliar with and lacking knowledge about certain parameters; and (4) an unrivalled reduction of the social distance between employer and staff. 68 C. VÉDRINE

* With regard to the analysis of the mythical narratives, a number of points can be raised. In the frst place, one could object that proposed typologies and classifcations are not always strict since they interpene- trate on at least two occasions. This happens in the episode about the salvation of the “Barbier et Daubrée” company which happened at the same time as the “Michelin et Cie” company was set up. The logic behind this choice of classifcation, however, matches the lessons, principles and tenets contained in each narrative. Using the surname “Michelin” to rename the company is neither for the authors I have studied, nor for the locals, a historical, let alone a mythical, event. The analysis of the narratives reveals the fve types of values underpinning the Michelin myth: (a) the concepts and values relating to inventiveness: creativity, discovery, ingenuity, invention, popularisation, technical know-how, performance, progress, testing, with proof winning; (b) the required qualities in order to partake in this inventiveness: curiosity, tenacity, cunning, willingness, dedication, professionalism and availability; (c) the values underlying the relation between the boss and his staff: benevolence, attention, respect, recognition, listening, trust and indebtedness; (d) the values governing the practices and behaviour at the company or, in other words, those governing the Michelin spirit: merit, meritocracy, duty, responsibility, setting an example, respecting the customer, savings, secrecy, simplicity and discretion; and (e) the price of success: salvation, renouncing, sacrifce and risk-taking. Perceived as self-evident, these values dictate ways of being and doing inherent in a spirit to which mythological construction fully contributes, and re-establishes the legitimacy of a business policy.

References Albert, Jean-Pierre. “Du martyr à la star. Les métamorphoses des héros nation- aux”. In La fabrique des héros, ed. Pierre Centlivres, Daniel Fabre, and et Françoise Zonabend, pp. 11–32. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1999. Anttonen, Pertti Juhani. “Le meurtre de l’évêque Henry ou la fabrication d’une mythologie nationale en Finlande”. In La fabrique des héros, ed. Pierre Centlivres, Daniel Fabre, and et Françoise Zonabend, pp. 103–114. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1988. Barrière, Antoine. Michelin vu de l’intérieur. Ce que j’ai vécu de 1950 à 1961. Témoignage de vie ouvrière. Nonette: Éditions Créer, 1983. 3 THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTH 69

Darmon, Olivier. The Michelin Man. 100 Years of Bibendum. Translated by Bernard Besserglik. London: Conran Octopus, 1997. Detienne, Marcel. The Creation of Mythology. Translated by Margaret Cook. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1986. Dufourt, Michel. Le vrai scandale Michelin. Villeurbanne: Éditions Golias, 2000. Dumond, Lionel. L’épopée Bibendum, une entreprise à l’épreuve de l’histoire. Toulouse: Editions Privat, 2002. Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964 [1915]. Echevin, Pol. Echec au roi, Charles Tissier, 40 ans de combats. Paris: Les éditions ouvrières, 1985. Godelier Maurice. (entretien avec). “Entretien avec Maurice Godelier”. Info CREA Lyon, no. 4, pp. 31–37, 1997. Jemain, Alain. Un siècle de secrets. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1982. Lenclud, Gérard. “Vues de l’esprit, art de l’autre”. Terrain, no. 14, pp. 5–19, 1990. Levaï, Ivan, Messarovitch Yves and Michelin François. And Why Not? The Human Person at the Heart of Business. Translated by Mark Sebanc. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked—Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992. Lottman, Herbert. The Michelin Men. Driving an Empire. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003. Marin, Louis. Portrait of the King. Translated by Martha M. Houle. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988. Morge, Raymond-Louis. Michel, Marius, Marie et les autres… Trois générations chez Michelin. Clermont-Ferrand: Éditions De Borée, 2001. Pottier, Richard. Anthropologie du mythe. Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1994. Vedrine, Corine. L’esprit du capitalisme selon Michelin. Ethnologie d’un mythe industriel. Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Universit2 de Saint-Etienne, 2015. CHAPTER 4

Reifed Types of Myth and Company Ritual

A myth is not only the creation of a narrative requiring a subject around which it can be articulated, it is also reifed. The principles governing it are proclaimed and materialised through objects, for all to see for some, and imposed on language for others, while nominating the factory and social areas. The characters, the material supports and the terminology represent in the sense of Louis Marin (1988), that is, they present again and symbolise the mythical message.

4.1 the Mythical Figures Two characters have become mythical, not because of what they have created but by virtue of what they are and what they stand for. We are no longer dealing here with the mythical founders in mythical narratives but with the personifed symbols from mythical messages. Bibendum and François Michelin represent the two typologies used for analysing the narratives. Whereas Bibendum conveys the values embedded in stories of creation, salvation and challenges, François Michelin is not only one of the founding fathers but, more than that, he truly exemplifes the Michelin spirit.

4.1.1 Bibendum Bibendum is the symbol of global industrial and commercial success. The mascot personifes technicality, performance and progress. He also drives Michelin inventiveness and is its world-famous ambassador, its ubiquity underlining the power of its reach. His generous and reassuring shape1 make him a powerful character whose poise was suggested for a long time by the cigar he used to smoke until advertising legislation forced him to abandon it. Found all over the world, in various shapes adapted to local culture, Bibendum is a mythical advertisement character. He has become familiar and blends into the daily surroundings of road users who have adopted him as a guide and a landmark. Only in-depth anthropological semiolog- ical research would allow a fair study of this character.

4.1.2 François Michelin François Michelin, the second mythical fgure, is also important for the locals. Especially as the values he conveys cannot be delocalised or deglo- balised, he was made ambassador of the local spirit. Unlike Bibendum, who is a humanised character, François Michelin was a living myth until 2015. An emblematic fgure of paternalism, he is the most outspoken embodiment of secrecy and asceticism, which under- pin the Michelin spirit. Moreover, whereas Bibendum’s mythical value is carried by people from all over the world, François Michelin’s value originates from two sources. First the locals, the people of Clermont- Ferrand. They have all seen or heard about the man who came to work on foot or in a Citroën 2CV, showing his badge at the entrance of the factory, wearing an overall, and working from a simple, no-frills offce. François Michelin can best be described as discreet and austere. The fact that he never displayed in any way his personal wealth adds to his mythical character. He would not only consider such a display to be in bad taste, but his wish to be close to his staff prompted him to dress and behave in a way rather far removed from his social position. The desire to reduce the social space separating him from his staff dictated his actions and demeanour in the factory. François Michelin cultivated an

1 In this sense, as Anne Raulin pointed out to me, the mascot brings matrix referents to mind. 4 REIFIED TYPES OF MYTH AND COMPANY RITUAL 73 irreproachable attitude while setting the example, which created the illusion among the workforce of social proximity with their boss:

François Michelin is respectable, he is exemplary, modest. We knew François because our daughter was in the same class as his daughter and when she said that she was the Michelin daughter, everybody said: that’s not true. She did her solemn communion. There were meetings before to prepare it, the parents were invited. François was always 5 minutes late. And my François, when he arrived, there were no chairs left so he went to sit on the edge of a table and listened. The day of the ceremony, we all came in our polished cars and he came in his “deudeuche” [Citroën 2CV]. He even let the school use it to prepare the communion. The parents had been invited for the evening. He spoke a long time with the chap selling the newspaper La Montagne on the place des Carmes. […] That’s François for you. He was someone. (Mr. Voison, retired worker, aged 60)

Respectable, exemplary and modest are the words used to describe François Michelin. The anecdotes told by Mr. Voison supporting the description of his employer highlight his simplicity and present two opposing couples to which François Michelin and the locals belong: the “deudeuche” versus the “polished cars”, the uncomfortable position “on the edge of a table” versus the comfortable position seated on a chair. The character’s greatness is shown through his humbleness and virtual situation reversal in terms of the staff’s standard expectations, since the boss is the one who usually exhibits his assets and his social position. Listening, dialogue and help through lending his car are the three qualities acknowledged by the narrator who shows his sympathy and his symbolic proximity to the chairman through an informal mode of appropriation (“my” François), and eventually concludes: “He was someone”.

When I became an executive, at the end of the apprenticeship, all of us who passed at that time, we spent two hours with him and asked him anything we wanted. And I was surprised because he is a really relaxed guy, he answered everything, he basically accepted everything. Me, I remember that in those days there was a story about the boss of FIAT in [the magazine] Paris Match. He was shown next to a swimming pool with gorgeous girls. And I was comparing François Michelin who went to work in a raincoat, walking all the way from the cours Sablon, and the other guy who was having his picture taken. And I asked him what he felt when he saw things like that, and he burst out laughing. He said: ‘Yes, but in the end 74 C. VÉDRINE

you have to be more down to earth than that, what good would it do me, me, my life is about making tyres, about satisfying clients […]’… And he walked to work, I’ve seen him several times. He came through the gate, like the workers, the employees. (Mr. Asti, retired engineering draughts- man, aged 71)

This excerpt evidences a “standardness” with the description of François Michelin as a “relaxed guy”. The suggested comparison between the CEO of Fiat and the manager of the Michelin company symbolises François Michelin’s distinctive simplicity and discretion, giving a glimpse of the unthinkable, even inappropriate and absurd staging of his success and his wealth. However, François Michelin could not have worn his overall and worked in an unassuming offce for ffty years if he had merely been driven by cynical manipulation of his staff. Therefore, another element contributing to his mythical dimension is what could be termed his life philosophy underpinning his Clermont-Ferrand business policy, marked by Christianity and asceticism. This is not about refuting the colossal for- tune of the Michelin family but rather about it not being enjoyed in public. It is in this sense that François Michelin embodies simplicity, which has been praised as it is so unexpected coming from the man representing a global industrial powerhouse.

When I started at Michelin, I thought he was a tramp. I’d never seen François Michelin in my life, I say to the foreman: ‘Look at that yokel coming, look at his trousers’. He says to me: ‘Shut up, that’s François’. Well, that struck me, it made me happy to see him because François Michelin, for Clermont, he was a gentleman, I imagined him with a nice tie, a nice suit, nice wheels. A 2 CV, all very stuffy, well, it made me feel good. I was happy to have seen my boss like that. I said to myself: blimey, he is not proud, he isn’t. I can’t forget these things because he was always unpretentious, he walked past us and shook hands with us, like with a foreman. When you’re small, you’re happy when an older boy, not stoops, but deigns greeting the little ‘uns. We liked that. He had an overall like us. That was the great thing. (Mr. Paris, retired worker, aged 64)

He was treated like a half-god and everyone was surprised that he was so accessible and human. The other source comes from journalists, intrigued and fascinated by this unusual employer. François Michelin mistrusted journalists and as 4 REIFIED TYPES OF MYTH AND COMPANY RITUAL 75 a result hardly ever gave an interview. A culture of secrecy was thus fostered, which in turn contributed to the construction of the myth around him. The Only Boss after God, according to a 2001 headline of Le Monde when Édouard took over from his father François. The way Levaï et Messarovitch (2003, xv) portray François Michelin perfectly illustrates how the press boosted his mythical dimension. The authors heap praise on him: “Everything about him is distinguished: his bearing, his manner of speech, and his offce. This fne fgure of a man, tall and elegant, is actually dressed in the most neutral way imaginable: A grayish, nonde- script suit, an all-occasion tie, and a solid pair of dress shoes constitute his daily uniform. What a contrast with his thousand-and one intellectual and spiritual preoccupations! […] When he reaches the grounds of the factory at the wheel of his gray BX GTI, he shows his ID badge to the guard, as he does every morning. It makes no difference that he is François Michelin. The rules have to be respected. […] He walks to a massive wooden door built out of sober oak without any excess of mold- ings, which leads to the executive offces… In fact, the executive offces begin in a corridor that has a succession of doors, all alike, on both sides. On the left, the frst one opens up into a small room with yellow walls. A wooden desk, built in the last century at about the same time as the frst plant, stands right beside another piece of furniture of undefned style. In a corner, within arm’s reach — space is strictly rationed here — there is a shelf that holds a funny-looking model railcar mounted on tires, made from painted food cans — a gift from grateful railwaymen in Madagascar! This, indeed, is François Michelin’s offce — monastic: a lamp, three pieces of furniture, and, behind the door, a coatrack with two hooks. Hung carefully from the right-hand hook is a set of overalls”. In essence Bibendum and François Michelin are opposing characters. Whereas one proudly, and sometimes even arrogantly, conveys the power of the company, the other is discreet. And while one is world famous, the other is only known by those he rubs shoulders with in the course of his duties: the locals in Clermont-Ferrand, the press, political and industrial fgures. These two characters take shape through objects. Both François Michelin’s attributes, the overall and the Citroën 2CV, are undeniably strong symbols of the Michelin myth. Standing for simplicity and discretion, they represent by themselves on the one hand François Michelin and the Michelin spirit on the other. As for the Bibendum character, he is represented in all shapes and forms: fgurines, clothes, posters, umbrellas, pencils, games and all kinds 76 C. VÉDRINE of other objects. A shop in central Clermont-Ferrand sells a vast array of tourist memorabilia representing Bibendum. Each of these objects can have a different destiny. Some become heritage tokens or museum displays, while others end up as sought after collector items. Since 2000 fans from all over the world gather in Clermont-Ferrand where Michelin objects are auctioned.

4.2 the Objects Supporting the Myth and the Company Rituals

4.2.1 The Medal and the Totems Another object embodies the Michelin myth. It is a medal bearing the likeness of Édouard Michelin, awarded during the annual ceremony to reward those members of staff who have clocked up thirty or forty years at the company. Édouard Michelin’s portrait, frst name and surname are featured on the front of the medal. Bibendum and a tyre are engraved on the back and around the bottom curve. Many of the people I spoke to proudly showed me their medal, symbolising at the same time their belonging to the frm, loyalty and merit. Louis Marin refects on the relation between power and representation and considers the medal to be “perfect representation, that is, complete without lack or fault, because it is entirely inscription, portrait and name. The medal as legitimate and authorized representation contains the prince in his glory and memory and, by that, dependent on the public domain, it eternalizes him […] The power of the medal […] is an immediate effect of the inscription of that authority” (1988, 126). The presence of Édouard Michelin as a representation is a tribute to his memory. The medal represents in that it makes the deceased (Édouard Michelin) present. It symbolises the part for the whole (Michelin), with all that the signifer Michelin suggests and implies, in other words, represents. Finally, the architecturally imposing test tracks at the Cataroux factory form an actual totem rising at the north entrance of Clermont- Ferrand. Nowadays they are listed on the French Supplementary Historic Monument List. In the words of a local, they are “michelinesque”. The tracks represent the economic and spatial power soaring into the sky (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). 4 REIFIED TYPES OF MYTH AND COMPANY RITUAL 77

Fig. 4.1 The tracks at Cataroux, 2015 (Author photograph)

Fig. 4.2 The tracks at Cataroux, 2015 (Author photograph)

I use the word “totem” because it carries a number of taboos, expressed in the Michelin company through what the locals call “the cult of secrecy”, linked in the frst place to space. The spatial imprint and hold alone mark, support and witness a collective history and memory underlying the mythical construct Michelin. Space is also considered as 78 C. VÉDRINE a dichotomy between the profane and the sacred spheres. For the people of Clermont-Ferrand, the entrance to the factories, a threshold between public space as used by all and the unknown private space Michelin, signals the entrance to a sacred space to which the public has no access. Moreover, members of staff can only access their work place, the rest of the factory being off limits. The requirement of silence and the ban on entering workshops other than one’s own fuel everyone’s imagination on what happens behind the company entrance for some (the locals) and behind the doors for others (the Michelin employees). The threshold “in contact through a game of showing and hiding” becomes “in essence a gateway” (Salignon 1996, 64*) to the other world where the keys to all entrances are reserved for a happy few and where the impossibility to enter it makes the spaces sacred. This calls to mind the separation described by Durkheim between sacred things protected by prohibitions and profane things to which those prohibitions apply. Terminology is the last support of the myth. In the frst place, we should note the continuity of the name Michelin. The fact that the company is managed by a man with the surname Michelin, which cements his kinship with the founding fathers of the tyre manufacturer, contributes to the company’s mythical dimension. Secondly, equally important are the symbolic street names in the district of La Plaine. Thérèse and Édouard Michelin gave them names corresponding to a moral and/ or religious value. Streets named Welfare, Friendship, Kindness, Trust, Charity, Hope or Faith refer to Christian and caring virtues, whereas Courage, Duty, Valour and Willingness suggest the virtues of work. The locals are quick to point to these street names to illustrate the history of Michelin paternalism and the company spirit. This terminology is therefore an integral part of the myth in terms of what it represents. In addition, this moral spatial framework acts as a reference, as if the residents of the housing projects did not possess those values or were at risk of losing them, thus requiring a constant reminder of their virtues, including in their address. If faith and valour do not inhabit the worker, at least he does inhabit them.

4.2.2 The Medal Awarding Ceremony As an occasion for summoning mythical stories, the medal ritual allows to anchor the collective identity inasmuch as it is a formal moment trig- gering a link between the company’s history, both the individual and the 4 REIFIED TYPES OF MYTH AND COMPANY RITUAL 79 collective memory, and the myth: “the rite allows to keep the memory alive by reactivating the creative part of the event that created the collective identity” (Dosse 2000, 192*). Three moments stand out during the annual medal ritual. Firstly, the speech by the Michelin family member managing the company, which relies on mythical episodes. Secondly, the medal awarding. Finally, the meal, presided by the management, with its communion overtones. A fourth moment can be added to this, the publication of the speech transcript in the company’s internal newsletter, illustrated with a photograph of each individual medal recipient, including their name and department. A ritual, from the Latin ritus (ordinance, rite), imposes, organises and gives meaning. Whereas a myth widens ordinary time, a ritual “brings together mythic time and the profane sphere of life and action” (Ricœur 2006, 105). A rite affects time which has now become shared, embed- ding each individual in a shared history (which incidentally includes the unfolding ritual). The rite reaffrms and consolidates the social link created among the members of the group, interweaving individual time with social time. Belonging to the institution that is Michelin and to its belief community is thus reinforced, as taking part in the ritual implies accepting and believing the symbols being used. In substance, a rite helps to measure the degree of integration in the community since the number of employees attending the award meal allows to determine the degree to which they belong to and believe in the Michelin system. In this sense, the company ritual is, to quote Pierre Bourdieu (1991), a “rite of institution” which distinguishes its members from those who are excluded. Isn’t awarding a medal tantamount to awarding a distinction? The change in status brought about by the ritual distinguishes adherence to the system of values, ways of being and doing advocated by the Michelin company, and upheld, legitimised and justifed by its mythical construction. A ritual is accordingly endowed with symbolic effectiveness. What Bourdieu terms the “social function” of ritual translates into the “essential effects of rites, namely that of separating those who have undergone it, not from those who have not yet undergone it, but from those who will not undergo it in any sense, and thereby instituting a lasting difference between those to whom the rite pertains and those to whom it does not pertain” (op. cit., 117). The author adds: “the act of institution is thus an act of communication, but of a particular kind: it signifes to someone what his identity is, but in a way that both expresses it to him 80 C. VÉDRINE and imposes it on him by expressing it in front of everyone […] and thus informing him in an authoritative manner of what he is and what he must be” (op. cit., 121), that is, as far as we are concerned, a “good” and loyal member of the Michelin company, rewarded with a proudly accepted medal. The institution ritual stages emotions and helps, among other things, to place individuals in a system of meaning and recognition: “The veritable miracle produced by acts of institution lies undoubtedly in the fact that they manage to make consecrated individuals believe that their existence is justifed, that their existence serves some purpose” (op. cit., 127). Presided and orchestrated by the character of the heroic employer, the medal ritual reaffrms his greatness and allows sharing it, as it were. * By way of short conclusion, let us briefy return to the way history, memory and myth are related, the frst two being adjusted in favour of the third. A myth does not burden itself with the truth of the facts. As a symbolic narrative about origins, it presents subject-heroes whose greatness is made into an identifcation point. The history of the Michelin company has been adjusted to suit the eulogy of the frm and its owners by constructing a myth conveying and transmitting the origin of the values and social rules governing the Michelin spirit. The cornerstones of the Michelin spirit are therefore revealed by a myth fuelled by a story. Reports by journalists fascinated by the company, author-witnesses and the management of the frm intensify the myth either by adopting a romanticised version of events or by selecting certain episodes. The myth has also been powered by a memory, shaped by distortion and forgetting. As a recollection of an experienced event or a story read or heard, memory evolves and changes according to what and whom it is enlisted for. In that sense, the Bibs and the local population take part in both building and sustaining a myth that cannot be reduced to a company construction. Bad faith and oversight have been instrumental in arranging local history and memory. Constructing a myth helped to justify a set of values, of ways of doing—or practices—and being which constitute a spirit and play the same role for the company and its employees. For the company, it is a question of justifying a business policy. For the employees, it is a matter of justifying their support to that policy and, consequently, their loyalty. 4 REIFIED TYPES OF MYTH AND COMPANY RITUAL 81

References Bourdieu, Pierre. “Rites of Institution”, in Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (trans.), Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Dosse, François. L’histoire. Paris: Armand Colin, 2000. Levaï, Ivan, Messarovitch Yves, and Michelin François. And Why Not? The Human Person at the Heart of Business. Translated by Mark Sebanc. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003. Marin, Louis. Portrait of the King. Translated by Martha M. Houle. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988. Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Salignon, Bernard. Le seuil, un chiasme intime-dehors, in Le sens du lieu, Bruxelles, Ousia, pp.55–67, 1996. CHAPTER 5

The Myth and Its Justifcations with the Michelin Spirit: The Father, the Son and the Healthy Spirit

In the introduction I indicated that the Michelin spirit is an ideology that justifes the choice of capitalism underpinning the company culture, a strategic tool for subscribing to the corporate values. Here, I will examine in more depth each element of that culture. The Michelin spirit is frst and foremost based on values drawn from a moral and religious context. It also hinges on standards relating to secrecy and asceticism, and governs the staff’s way of being and doing. The patriarchal model is also at the heart of the Michelin spirit, in line with Le Play’s philosophy. Its cornerstone is the fgure of the exemplary father, embodied successively by Édouard and François Michelin, with his role of authority, protection and education.

5.1 the Institutionalising Relation of Interdependence. Rights, Duties and Obligations: The Father Figure The father fgure operates in the frst place through the paternalistic system, which dictates the rules governing the interdependence between the employer and his staff, but also through the name of father “Michelin”, borne and transmitted to this day, and fnally through the set of matrimonial strategies of the Michelin dynasty, which reveal the

© The Author(s) 2019 83 C. Védrine, The Spirit of Capitalism According to the Michelin Company, Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96610-6_5 84 C. VÉDRINE values assigned to the institution of the family and to the position of each of its members in the home.

5.1.1 The Paternalistic System, the Father or the Parenting Role The social peace cultivated by paternalism is the result of preserving what Le Play calls “mutual agreement” (see Chapter 2). The relation of interdependence between the employer and his staff is powered by two-way fnancial interests, supported by duties, mutual obligations and appreci- ation. Duty refers to individual forms of responsibility: since participating in the company’s prosperity by contributing work and capital ensures a fnancial reward for all, the staff must obey the head of the company who takes on the responsibilities assigned to the head of the family in exchange for a double gratitude: for providing the daily bread and for protecting the employees, thus averting professional and social insecurity.

“François Michelin, he was like a father to me, miss. Absolutely. A father. He gave me everything, everything I have and everything I am today, it’s thanks to him” (Mr. Paris, retired worker, aged 64). “He was like a father to me. I owe him everything”. (Mr. Barthaire, retired administrative offcer, aged 65)

To the saviour and benefactor fgure personifed by “Michelin” we should also add the fgure of the all-round father, at the same time nur- turing, protecting and educating, as portrayed and recognised by the employees. The care and attention given to staff by means of a paternalistic policy foster an emotional bond between the boss and his staff, consolidated by isolated acts which are effective because they are transmitted through narratives. For example:

When I turned 75, the image I had of François changed. I wanted to set up this club for retired staff, to meet twice a month. I went through the usual channels and asked around to fnd accommodation. I tried to see HR to ask them for some time off and they told me ‘You’re here to work, not to organize parties’. One day I got fed up and wrote to François Michelin. […] Today I’m ashamed I wrote this letter to Monsieur François Michelin. And I was surprised, I got a phone call afterwards and they called me in. My colleagues say: ‘Why are you being summoned?’, ‘I wrote to François Michelin’, ‘You’re crazy!’. […] I was called in by the head of recruitment 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 85

in a dark offce, not much light. […] He had sheets of paper, asking me questions, taking notes, never looking at me. After a while I got fed up, I was 25 years old … I said: ‘If you don’t want to do anything for the old ones …’ and he was the one who said to me: ‘No. We say retired’. Or ‘the elders’, can’t remember. And that made me think afterwards. He said to me: ‘Did someone tell you that we no longer want to do anything? I’ve got a proposal for you. We want to change the district of La Plaine […] We want to build premises for retired staff. I want you to be able to think about taking this venue on and get the retired staff together almost every day. In the beginning it will be like volunteer work but later you can join a department at the factory’. (Mr. Dambert, employee, aged 54)

This excerpt describes how a 25-year-old young man became aware of his employer’s moral values and regrets his arrogance towards him. The semantic shift from “François” to “Monsieur François Michelin” refects that the story concludes with respect. The positive response to Mr. Dambert’s request, with its high aims and hopes, forces him to reas- sess the situation and he elevates his employer to the rank of respectful man of honour while lowering himself, by blaming himself for his clumsiness that generated shame. It is worth noting that François Michelin does not intervene in person at any stage of the story, yet he comes out of it with full honours through a metonymic process, as the company representative. The young man’s shame and clumsiness contrast with wisdom (“we don’t say the old ones”…), an attentive ear and his concern being addressed through action. Understanding and attentive, Michelin therefore symbolises the father concerned with the well-being of his employees, a concern that is expressed through valuing work. By actively listening to employees, the know-how providers, the Michelin family constantly seek to reduce the social distance separating them, as brought out by the mythical stories. This allows them to be on the lookout for suggestions and, consequently, technical improvements: “I had to identify the manufacturing parts to be kept, the ones to be modifed and I had to give an order; I explained this order to the worker and asked him whether in executing it he encountered any diffculty that I had not foreseen. I noticed that, although this question was quite familiar to me, this friendly conversation was extremely useful for researching facts. There are things that a man, who plays with the material for eight hours every day, knows, whereas his boss, who obviously deals with many different questions, may not” (Excerpt of the leafet [brochure] Édouard Michelin 1859–1940). 86 C. VÉDRINE

In response to this well-meaning attention, which does expect something practical in return (“useful for researching facts”) but does not conceal that the value of the work done is approached differently (“the man who plays with” versus his employer who “obviously deals with many different questions”), the employees feel genuine respect for their employer. In the frst place because he guarantees their well-being, but also because he “gets his hands dirty” and really knows his product:

François is a real character. Actually meeting him, you have respect. He has a proper technical response. You show him very specialised technical projects and he has the right question. And we’ve been working for years on that stuff, or months. And he really has perspective, he gets it all, basically. It’s impressive. I think he’s very intelligent or he’s got a lot of experience, dunno. In any case he has a technical response which is really valuable. He’s not a CEO who doesn’t know anything. (Miss Nalie, research chemist, aged 33)

The employer’s respectability is emphasised by his role of the father looking after his children, symbolised by the term maison[frm]1 that pinpoints the kinship linking the family members. These symbolic family ties maintain the illusion of an equal social status. Regardless of their social background, all the employees’ children sit at the same school desks and write in the same exercise books, the school supplies having been handed out by the father fgure on the frst day of school. In doing so, each individual is guaranteed the same chances to succeed profession- ally at the company as a result of a meritocratic illusion, in particular by wearing a uniform that erases social inequalities:

Everything was provided, the paper to cover the books, the sports out- ft, and also we were all the same. Your father could be a worker or an engineer, nobody knew […]. In the end, equal opportunities existed in those days, but not and anymore. [….] Of course, it was strict and all that, but you have to admit that the pupils, I didn’t know any who couldn’t read and everybody got through. And, of course, it happened, people said in inverted commas that it was brainwashing. Maybe, but in the end the results were there to see …. (Mrs. Chime, former pupil at the Michelin schools, aged 50)

1 See Note 2 of the chapter 1. 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 87

As pointed out by Philippe Hamman, the business strategies encom- passed in paternalism “imply at the same time that a number of diver- sifed services are offered to the employees but also a symbolic identifcation process” (2001, 114*), in other words a system of believing in the Michelin myth and belonging to a particular community brought together under the same identifcation umbrella, in this case father “Michelin”: “the believers, grouped together in ecclesia, broth- erhoods or by lineage, are thus connected to an ambivalent god often called “father”, who gives and judges. They are united by their compliance with the dominating ideal and repeated individual and/or collective sacrifces” (Pradelles de Latour 2001, 31*). At Michelin, the sanctity of the idealised and feared father is at the root of self-sacrifce, including one’s private life and control of the body, to which we will come back later. As a reward, the father accepts to give a few presents. Merit awards and long service awards symbolise the business gift that “embodies the loyalty link, rewards trust, pays tribute, marks a territory of relations and belonging” (Gérôme 1998, 552*). Furthermore, the parenthood function sometimes even extended as far as legal tutoring, with Michelin taking the place of the father of children of staff, often future employees themselves who had become a Michelin ward. All in all, it is the notion of citizenship itself which gives rise to the spirit of Michelin as a corporate culture defning the identity and the belonging of the Bibs. Indeed, the interdependent relationships between “father” Michelin and his employees are an expression of “the relationship between citizenship and governance” which involves norms, values and duties, and which is “directly dependent on rights, obligations and responsibility on both sides of the spectrum” (Pardo and Prato 2010, 9; Pardo 2010).

5.1.2 The Michelin Surname: Transmitting the Name of the Father The father fgure owes his effectiveness to his name. Locally, the continuity of the name “Michelin”, the name of the founding father of both a product with a global presence evidencing its fame and an all- encompassing paternalistic policy, gives it weight. The name of the grandfather can be “regarded as a title which is both obligatory and exclusive”, according to Lévi-Strauss (1966, 190). The transmission of the surname therefore creates an obligation. It requires its bearer to honour the contents and symbolic representations of the 88 C. VÉDRINE surname. The continuity of the name implies dictates a certain behaviour: “using our name is a right and entails obligations. It indicates a place that has been allocated to us before birth” (Herfray 1999, 27*). The representative of the Michelin dynasty guarantees the symbolic and mythical continuity. The fascination the company inspires is largely due to this continuity that is akin to ancestor and name worship. Through the surname Michelin, the name of the father becomes effective for the employees and the people of Clermont-Ferrand. Linchpin, legislator, “locus of the law” “lieu de la loi” (Lacan 2006, 485), “it is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identifed his person with the fgure of the law” (op.cit., 230). The name of the father cements Michelin’s parental function in his symbolic kinship relations with his staff. Michelin-the-father imposes a course of action, that is, not only the law in the legal sense, which would reduce it to an authoritarian role, but also the law as a spirit or way of being in the world. Because the father imposes the law, the Michelin family has never had to lend their name to municipal political games. No one in the family has ever taken part in any political campaign. What’s more, they have never expressed their support for any candidate. Fathers without ever being mayors, the Michelin family rules over Clermont-Ferrand through power while staying out of local political life.

5.1.3 The Kinship System of the Michelin Family The signifcant number of endogamous marriages and fliation relations makes it diffcult to study the kinship within the Michelin family. The family tree I managed to draw up is nevertheless incomplete and reading it was further complicated by complex intertwined marriage links. This double diffculty in writing and reading sums up a kinship system divided in multiple branches through marriage strategies to preserve the family assets, economically as well as symbolically, signifed by the transmission of the name. The choice of spouse, on which social and family reproduction rests, is a strategic matter. “The prestige of a family, its age, its place in local hierarchies are all considerations for marriage strategies” (Segalen 1998, 118*) such as homogamous and endogamous marriage. 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 89

Several restricted exchange and cross-cousin marriage bonds have been established across four chosen families: the Wolffs, the Callies, the Montagne and the Puiseux. Auguste Wolff, André and Édouard Michelin’s father-in-law, was the paternalistic head of the Parisian piano manufacture Pleyel, which employed 200 workers and whose business policy may have inspired his son-in-law. In addition to the restricted exchange marriage between the two Wolff sister (Thérèse and Sophie) and the two Michelin brothers (André and François), we fnd a sororate in André Michelin’s second marriage, at the age of 66, to his deceased wife’s sister Jeanne. Pierre and Jacques Callies, sons of the heir to the stationery frm Aussedat, were two major shareholders of Cie Bull, a company that specialised in manufacturing punchcard accounting machines. Three of Édouard’s fve children married into the Callies family, thus starting the maternal line of the future François Michelin. It is therefore not a coincidence that Michelin came to the rescue of the struggling Bull company. Three of Étienne Michelin’s children, himself a son of Édouard, married a Montagne, whose father, a lawyer and MP, was known for having chaired the French Catholic Youth Association [l’Associationcatholique de la jeunessefrançaise], for founding the Rally of Democratic Forces [Rassemblement des Forces Démocratiques] and for beating Pierre Mendès France in the 1958 general election in the Eure department. Robert Puiseux, one of Édouard’s sons-in-law who succeeded him at the head of the company until such time as a Michelin would return at the helm, was an artillery and air force lieutenant during the First World War, before working alongside his father-in-law. His sister also married a Michelin, Jean, one of André’s sons. It is worth noting the endogamous marriage between Noël Michelin, son of Jean Michelin and Marguerite Puiseux, and his cross-cousin on mother’s side. The fact that Noël married a woman with the same frst name and surname as his mother’s is rather disconcerting to say the least … In addition to social homogamy, there is biological and alliance endog- amy, preferential marriages making it possible to limit alliance links with too many families. The restricted exchange marriages with the Wolffs, the Callies, the Montagne and the Puiseux contribute to the preservation of the family and social assets since the emphasis lies on their complete transmission or on controlling any scattering. As Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot showed in their survey Grand Fortunes, “to manage and 90 C. VÉDRINE to transmit wealth is not as simple as one might imagine, and the whole group fnds itself mobilized in these tasks upon which its perpetuation as the dominant class depends” (1998, 5). Therefore, the Michelin family encourages in particular cross-marriage, especially as it allows celebrat- ing double weddings on the same day: “the advantage of two ceremonies for the price of one will not go unnoticed” (Miquel 1962, 51*). As for marriage between cousins, it not only limits dispersing the assets but it helps keeping dowry money in the family, just like cross-marriages, which frequently are balanced alliances or exchanges, to use Lévi-Strauss’ term. When a Michelin brother and sister marry a Callies sister and brother, the costs of the alliance tend to cancel each other out … The flial way of transmitting the company, and in so doing the symbolic signifcance of the Michelin assets, requires further attention. The history of the Michelin dynasty seems to be entirely built around the transmission of the name exclusively through the line of Édouard, as none of André’s descendants had the opportunity to manage the family company. The power of Édouard and François Michelin as father fgures fnds a new source and legitimacy here. When Édouard dies in 1940, one of André’s two sons could have succeeded their uncle but, according to historians, the eldest son, although a member of the Supervisory Board [Conseil de Surveillance], an administrator of the Sharifan Tyre Company Michelin [Ciechérifenne des pneus Michelin] and the manager of “social welfare”, has no desire to manage the company and prefers devoting himself to his passion—music. His brother Marcel Michelin, director of the Studies and Testing Department [Études- Essais], also turns down the offer. Having joined the resistance, he refused to manage a company commandeered by the Germans. As far as François Michelin is concerned, Édouard’s grandson is just fourteen years old at that time. Édouard therefore appoints Robert Puiseux and Pierre Boulanger to succeed him as joint managers. Robert Puiseux joined the Michelin factories in 1919, after the war. Édouard’s son-in-law worked in various departments: methods, trade, recruitment, quality control, research and testing. “The Place des Carmes was his university, and he would spend nineteen years ‘training’ with the best possible master (and missionary) – Édouard Michelin – until his death” (Lottman 2003, 279—French edition). He therefore seems to be the perfect suc- cessor because as a son-in-law he ensures that the assets are kept in the family and also because he appears ideally suited for transmitting the frm’s principles. 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 91

Pierre Boulanger was introduced by Marcel Michelin whom he befriended during military service. After reading law, he became a journalist, then a bank employee in Canada and a driver in Chicago, and eventually he succeeded Pierre Michelin at the head of the Citroën factories and was appointed vice-president to assist Robert Puiseux in managing the factories. “The only recommendation came on his deathbed, when Édouard asks Robert Puiseux, when he deems the time is ripe, to pass the torch to a Michelin. Robert Puiseux will make this appointment as a sole sovereign” (Jemain 1982, 103*). When Pierre Boulanger dies in 1950, the descendants of André Michelin, although available, were not approached. It is not until 1955 that Robert Puiseux asks François Michelin to work with him, before handing the reins over to him four years later. François Michelin in turn invites his son Édouard to join him in 1991, and appoints him as head of the company in 1999 together with René Zingraff. It was therefore Édouard’s line that was favoured. Historians report that this has certainly upset André’s descendants. This point is important for understanding the Michelin spirit. We should remember the brothers’ rather different characters. One, André, indulges in society events, publicity, galas and cocktails. The other, Édouard, is seen as discreet and austere, and is happy for his brother to deal with marketing. So, he is the one behind the major principles that will become the Michelin spirit, the one who imposes his line. Édouard Michelin is at once the founder of the paternalistic policy at the company, the preacher of a corporate spirit and the ancestor of a line of company directors. He is the father of the company, of the institution and the organisation through which he is able to transmit the corporate spirit. It is therefore no coincidence that, of the two brothers, Édouard is the one called “father” by the locals and André is referred to more informally by his frst name.

5.1.4 Organisation and Family Saga The place of the patriarch is one of power and nobody can go against his will without being rejected. The patriarch imposes his choices both in the matrimonial rules and in the family model to be followed, as well as the succession rules to be implemented. Of course, the model is that of the traditional middle-class family: hardly any divorce, forbidden by family practices, and many children. Each individual has to fnd a good match and being single is only tolerated if it means taking holy orders. 92 C. VÉDRINE

This model is also imposed to the company employees: divorce is unacceptable and being single disturbing, all the more so as the Michelin family itself follows these principles to the letter. Responsibility for the distribution and the division of work within the family lies with the one who rules. The numerous internal factory departments offer a position to many family members, whether by blood or marriage. Here we fnd representatives of the lines of André and Édouard, bearing in mind that “the – not to be underestimated! – advantage of belonging to a dynasty lies in owning a number of shares. These have been transmitted through inheritance but are not equally distributed: none of the family units own enough shares to impose its will on the statutory manager” (Miquel 1962, 20*). However, in order to access the company management, one has to not only belong to Édouard Michelin’s line, but also have been prepared to take on the succession. The authors of publications dealing with the Clermont-Ferrand company candidly describe François Michelin as the man who was raised as the heir apparent (Miquel 1962; Jemain 1982; Lottman 2003) while waiting for succession and for his name to be reassigned to the family company. Incidentally the local population often qualify the Michelin succession system as “royalist”. Arranged marriages and chosen successors contribute at the same time to the sacredness of the family: the Michelins function on the same model as royal dynasties precisely because they are a big family whose role, in the eyes of the locals, is both economic and symbolic. It should be pointed out that since Édouard Michelin’s death in 2006, some Bibs and Clermont-Ferrand inhabitants suspect that the family is actually pre- paring one of the sons of the deceased to eventually take over the management of the company… The role of women should be examined in more depth. As with other patriarchal systems, their power lies underground, be it as wives or mothers. At Michelin, they play an important part in transmitting family culture, by validating it and cementing it through the children’s education on the one hand, and by their leading role in applying the paternalistic laws which emanated from them on the other. They may not be referred to as “mother” by the locals but they do receive the honorary title “Madame” Michelin. Advising their husbands, educating the children, guaranteeing the image of the “good wife” in the Bibs’ eyes, the women are also the “highest good” (Lévi-Strauss) that is exchanged in interfamily alliances. They introduce new male fgures to the family 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 93 circle, some of whom, as we have seen, took on a strategic role, the most signifcant example being Robert Puiseux who ends up living with his wife’s father. This matrilocality, although justifed by the presence of the patriarch and father of the daughter-in-law, clearly shows the importance of the role of father and mother. In addition, the reason for the emotional attachment of the Clermont-Ferrand’s people to the Michelin family, besides its symbolic role, is the fantasy aspect its saga inspires. A number of tragic events that humanise the Michelin family have left a deep mark on its dynastic history. “Humanise” should be understood as the opposite of “deify”. What is more, the locals feel true compassion for this family that has not been spared the loss of several of its members in tragic circumstances. Marcel Michelin was informed on and arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 together with his son Jacques for having organised the resistance in Auvergne, and died at the Ohrdruf camp. Marguerite Puiseux, Robert Puiseux’s sister and wife of Jean Michelin, André Michelin’s second son, is arrested and deported by the Gestapo for hiding priests wanted by the Germans. Marguerite and Jean Michelin’s son dies with his two children in a car crash. Jean-Pierre Michelin, Marcel Michelin’s son, dies in 1943 in Corca, while fghting for the liberation of Corsica. The accidents of both Édouard’s sons explain Puiseux’s succession. The eldest, Étienne, died in a plane accident and Pierre in a car crash. Even directors in offce are hit by tragedy. Pierre Boulanger died of a heart attack in 1950 while driving, and the second Édouard Michelin died in a boat accident in 2006, just before turning forty-three (his wife also died a few years later). This string of deaths weakened the power of the Michelin power in the eyes of the locals, as being exposed to adversity somehow further decreases the social distance to staff. By the same token, it is a new opportunity to portray the family’s exemplary attitude when faced with tragedy:

They had to deal with really painful events. Whatever people say, things aren’t rosy, even for them. Poor souls, if you think of all the accidents and everything…. (Mrs. Marchat, Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 47)

The pain of the father is shared and makes him a father who is all the more mindful and understanding of other people’s misfortunes. The 94 C. VÉDRINE frst Édouard lost both his sons, François became fatherless at the age of fourteen and also lost one of his sons—enough to kindle compassion. * This approach of kinship by the Michelin dynasty has cleared the way for Édouard Michelin’s line as the chosen lineage through which the Michelin assets, including the symbolic aspect of the name, are transmitted. This approach also calls for a social identifcation system to be set up through terminology, which by the same token distinguishes those who are treated jokingly from those who are avoided, to use Radcliffe-Brown’s analytical framework. André belongs to the frst category. Branded extravagant and with a taste for society events, he is the opposite of his brother and the locals refer to him by his frst name. “Father Édouard” and “father François” on the other hand inspire deep respect. Aren’t their relatives who are part of the management team chosen on the basis of their kinship with one of them? André is “the brother” of Édouard, Puiseux his “son-in-law” and young Édouard is none other than “the son” of François… The social identifcation system governing kinship also makes it possible to bring to light the rights and duties of each of its members. The metaphor used by the paternalistic policy dear to Édouard and François, which keeps the employer and his staff linked through symbolic kinship, relies on this identifcation. In other words, the Michelin kinship system expresses the relationship between the directors and their employees and, beyond that, the locals. The use of the term maison[house, but also frm]2 to refer to the company and its members takes on its full meaning here. Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown in this context how “in Europe and other parts of the world”, maison is a term encompassing both a building and “moral subjects” (1987, 152). Finally, this approach of kinship shows how the father fgure is an integral part of the Michelin spirit created by Édouard. Together with his grandson, he exemplifes, guarantees and transmits it. In the almost biblical contrast between the two brothers André and Édouard, between the socialite and the ascetic, the latter prevailed. He has transmitted his way of being in the world to the point of making it a code of conduct and education, set as an example for all the employees of the company,

2 See Note 2 of the chapter 1. 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 95 who in turn undertake to spread the tenets of this Michelin spirit among the population of Clermont-Ferrand. And it is precisely because the Michelin family itself follows and embraces a number of principles, that it succeeds in imposing them to its employees all the more powerfully and credibly.

5.2 secret, Asceticism and Moral

5.2.1 The Secret: Hiding, Discretion and Silencing The second element of the Michelin spirit is the secret, which involves at the same time the hidden/shown dialectic, silence and discretion.

5.2.1.1 The Hidden/Shown Dialectic: The Inaccessibility of the Hidden Thing and the Imaginary Part of the Fenced-Off Secret Something that is hidden is shielded from view. Because it is not visible, the concealed thing is inaccessible. The hidden/shown dialectic must therefore be considered together with the visibility/obstruction and the inside/outside dialectic, since that which is hidden is kept inside to be protected from the outside. The people I have spoken to all mentioned that the company had demanded secrecy from them. The argument for this is protecting a recipe and know-how from industrial espionage by the competition, who are identifed as the prying eyes. However, to many this is an open secret in that it hardly prevents the competition from accessing the relevant information: “As soon as new Michelin tyre appears, the competition dis- sects it, slices it like a sausage” (Miquel 1962, 27*). One of the effects of a culture of secrecy is that it maintains an imaginary part. It is behind the closed factory doors that “things”, with their unknown contents and therefore shrouded in mystery, happen. Inside, in the workshops protected from outside eyes, the secret is kept by the members of the company. “Secrecy secures, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious world, and the latter is most strenuously affected by the former” (Simmel 1906, 462), as each individual has access to one single part of this fragmented world, the employees themselves only having access to their department while not being aware of what is being concocted in the offces and the workshops around them. Protection against the outside encourages everyone to stay in their place. 96 C. VÉDRINE

I resigned because I didn’t want to be trapped in a system that didn’t give me much freedom… let’s say freedom to undertake things… to have initiatives… with them everything is square… you know, at Michelin there are research workshops, well they have a second identical workshop and people don’t know that about each other… they work on the same project but in different places. They have no contact and are not even allowed to say ‘I work in such and such place’, maybe if they’ve known each other for a very long time, I don’t say it’s at production but in the design offces and stuff like that, and in the end I’m sure that’s what makes their strength. They have the secrecy bug there, it’s worse than the army. By the way they say that not a single head of state ever got inside the Michelin factory. (Mr. Démis, former Michelin industrial designer, aged 52)

When you want to go into a workshop for a repair, you have to ring the bell. You need permission. Sometimes I stay half an hour at the door before going in. At Michelin, they were really obsessed with secrecy. Often you see ‘secret workshop’. I don’t give a toss. The guys, if they want secrecy, they’ll get it one way or the other. You need to be a bit careful, that’s normal. But sometimes I think they overdo it at Michelin. Secrecy, secrecy! (Mr. Faure, maintenance agent, aged 51)

The etymology of the word “secret” reveals that it has its roots in separation, which governs precisely all the practices aimed at “keeping the secret”. Consequently, fencing off is achieved by scattering spaces and controls to make it more diffcult to put back together the list of products used for the “recipe”. Also, the hierarchy have no qualms, in order to justify the practices that the demand for secrecy implies, about bringing in a few mythical stories, the most effective undoubtedly being the one about the visit of General de Gaulle. The employees use it in turn to justify their ignorance about what is exactly going on in what they are involved in… Of course, the use of secrecy helps to keep many things, other than tyre production, hidden: the workings of the internal policy of labour exploitation, the use of toxic materials (responsible for occupational illnesses), non-observance of safety regulations, etc.

5.2.1.2 The Use of Knowledge/Power to Silence Keeping something secret and hidden therefore also amounts to keeping information quiet and, more generally, to remaining silent. “Too many people on the outside know what happens at the Firm. This is a 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 97 serious challenge for jobs… I ask you to be really careful in this respect. However, I do know that one gets used to secrecy. Sometimes what is secret and what is not becomes unclear. In that case, one should remain silent”, warns François Michelin (Michelin Magazine, no. 609, January 1994). According to Simmel, if human socialisation is determined by the ability to speak, it is shaped by the ability to preserve silence (Simmel 1906); however, at Michelin, it is not only shaped, but also based and built on silencing. And the ability to remain silent or keep a secret represents and seals a token of confdence. The culture of secrecy suggests to the employee on the one hand that his employer trusts him and, on the other, that he is bound to him by virtue of owning this secret. The moral value of trust matches that of wisdom through the use of silence. As a matter of fact, the staff are proud of owning this secret, not so much because of its contents but rather because of the trust it implies. Thus silenced, the Bibs never talk about their work outside Michelin, not even to family members:

My dad, I never knew what he really did at the company because there was this secret and in the evening at dinner he never talked about his work. But we weren’t curious, it’s just the way it was. Anyway, we didn’t know that elsewhere fathers talked about their working day, you see? For us it was normal, like for the Bibs’ kids today I suppose. (Mrs. Chime, worker’s daughter, aged 50)

It is only when the demand for silence, justifed to keep the secret, seems excessive to the Clermont-Ferrand inhabitants that they use the term “omerta”. “Any dictatorial intent starts by killing speech” (Le Breton 1997, 16*), and the consequence of silencing someone is frst and foremost to keep the matter quiet, as the impossibility of speaking is inten- sifed by the double threat of job loss and accusations of treason insofar as “there resides in confdence of men towards each other as high moral value as in the companion fact that this confdence is justifed” (Simmel 1906, 473). To keep something quiet is to prevent speaking and its effects, that is, becoming aware of the system of labour exploitation and protest, in favour of functional and primary communication. Those who attempt to raise their voices, for example unionised workers, bear the cost of it 98 C. VÉDRINE as the company is well known for its discriminatory practices towards those tempted to break the silence; speaking up in that case is tantamount to a confession about conditions of work and protest. Even staff demonstrations have something unsettling as they are silent. In 1999, I witnessed the staff demonstrations in Clermont-Ferrand following the scandal triggered by the announcement that 7500 jobs were being cut in Europe despite an increase in the company’s sales fgures. Despite the presence of a few leaders singing customary slogans, I was struck by how restrained, if not subdued, the demonstrators were. When I mentioned this to an employee of the Works Council library, he replied: “You know, I’ll tell you something. People were demonstrating there but if Édouard Michelin showed up to cross the road, they would stop to let him through”. The unusual way in which this demonstration took place revealed an ambiguous attitude, as if most demonstrators were apologis- ing for being there, or rather that it had come to this. As though they were embarrassed to protest against the father who, this time though, had gone too far. Silence is also a matter of knowledge and power. Keeping a secret quiet means possessing knowledge others do not and, on the one hand, exercising the power belonging to those who actually know as opposed to those who do not and, on the other, having the power to speak, dis- close and betray the secret. Regarding this last point, it is the threat from the hierarchy, as well as the genuine desire to keep a secret one has the honour to be entrusted with, that prevent and prohibit betrayal. The conviction of possessing knowledge, of having power which is illu- sory here, is perpetuated, as illustrated by this brief exchange of views Monsieur and Madame Pampi, both retired workers:

She: “It was mainly at the Z Department, the secrecy”. He: “It was everywhere”. She: “Yes, but especially at the Z Department”. He: “I was at the O Department and it was the same”. She: “Yes, but still”.

To make believe that the employees know and hold power allows the company to manage and exploit the workforce as it sees ft, the latter accepting the working conditions that are essential to keeping the secret. Conversely, sharing the secret allows giving the impression of belonging to the same community, each of its members being a holder of part 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 99 of this secret which together they would be able to put back together. Supportive and complicit, the employees impose on themselves all the customs and practices, such as silence or the lack of access to certain premises, which are driven by the preservation of the symbol of their knowledge-power. As happens for the initiated (Simmel 1906), the employee is asked upon joining, that moment marking his inclusion in the community of confdants, to keep the secret of which he becomes a safekeeper.

5.2.1.3 Disarming Discretion Discretion, or lack of ostentation, is expected from the employees. This other element becomes a reality in François Michelin whose fgure and simple attributes (the Citroën 2CV, the raincoat) have become mythical. The fact that François or his son are discreet themselves about their social position compels the employees to follow their example. The Michelin family’s exemplarity prevents any demonstrations, outbursts or manifestations. Their strength is so to speak to succeed in passing themselves off as “make-do people” (Sansot 1991*), “disarmingly” simple in the words of an employee. Unlike the captains of industry, the Michelins do not feel the need to behave in an ostentatious way, preferring the effectiveness of the paradoxical display of discretion. The Michelins foster a reduced social distance, which earns them respect and loyalty from their staff who consider them as one of theirs. It is worth noting that when it comes to this “disarming simplicity”, the Michelins are often referred to by their frst name. “Father Michelin” is the man who fulfls the entire range of paternal roles discussed earlier. “François” is a no-frills boss and therefore close. Remaining discreet and not showing oneself too much are other instructions, in addition to the requirement of silence. Clothing and adornments should therefore be kept equally quiet, as should, again, social inequalities. Staying discreet keeps the subject, as much as his silencing, quiet:

When people speak about the Michelin spirit, what do they mean by that? Someone who doesn’t think! It’s better to be a compliant dummy! Otherwise… well, you do like me, seventeen years without a raise. And it ends in court. I’m a trade unionist so it ends in court. (Mr. Facost, maintenance agent, aged 49) 100 C. VÉDRINE

It is against this sacrifcial fall of the individual that the frst voices will be raised, prompting by the same token a process of desacralisation (see Chapter 7). Here we deal with Durkheim’s defnition of sacred things as “things protected and isolated by prohibitions” (Durkheim 1964, 38). The supposedly hidden object in a separate world, of which everybody thinks they are partly the safekeeper, gains a sacred dimension that in turn justifes silence. Therefore, it is taboos linked to speaking that “force” into silence. Speaking is transgressing a law with potentially disastrous consequences for the whole group that is being jeopardised. In preserving the secret, which nobody actually possesses, there is the fear of sanction by the authority or by peers who are likely to punish the profanation amounting to treason, to restore the previously achieved order.

5.2.2 Asceticism: Discipline, Austerity and Thrift Discretion is critical for secrecy and asceticism as it stands for modesty but it can also resort to the demands linked to austerity. We will use the term asceticism, not in its religious meaning, but in the ordinary sense of an austere life, made of deprivations. This third element of the Michelin spirit calls in turn for self-sacrifce and assumes discipline, austerity and thrift (in the sense of protecting savings and moderation, as opposed to wastefulness).

5.2.2.1 Paternal and Military Discipline The company has two types of disciplinary principles, paternal and military, which consistently rely on obedience and respect. The paternalistic policy supposes instilling discipline, understood as rules of conduct, through a set of moral values encouraged and guaranteed by the father fgure, yet “the other face of the employer was concerned with extreme severity towards any who dared to show the slightest sign of dissent” (Noiriel 1990, 56): any protest is impossible and remains unthinkable as long as silence and discretion prevail. The father cannot and should not be upset. Everyone owes him obedience and respect. The military discipline is demonstrated through the management of time, space and the body, all transmission modes of the Michelin spirit. It is moreover understood that the company readily recruits ex-army personnel who get access to positions of authority while being used to receiving orders. 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 101

Discretion and simplicity, both key elements of secrecy, are also badges of modesty:

“One day D., I work with him, got the order to organise a picture of the Michelin management. So, D., thinking this offcial picture should be perfect, arranges for a designer to come from Paris, right. And when François Michelin arrived: ‘But what’s all this show?’ He said: ‘Take it all away, a table and a phone will do. Do you realise what impression we would give to people if we are seen in this décor?’” (Mr. Géol, Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 68)

Taken to the extreme, discretion becomes austerity, as evidenced by Levaï and Messarovitch’s description of François Michelin’s offce (see Chapter 4), which continues as follows: “This offce, of extreme modesty, stands in sharp contrast to the economic and fnancial power it represents. No other enterprise in the world that has sales of more than eighty billion francs would dare impose such a Spartan regime on its chairman. So François Michelin explains to you, of course, that in order to do good work the important thing is not to be ostentatious. Rather, what is really important is to be found deep within oneself. And he explains that a bare room is more conducive to thought and refection than a luscious space cluttered up with impressively useless gadgets” (2003, xiv). Social position does not give any privilege: the chairman, like his employees, has to show his badge at the entrance before accessing his work place, reminiscent of the workshops in its austerity. Thus, the display of objects that could arouse greed and envy is banned by a set of ascetic practices steered by the chairman’s exemplarity.

You saw how they talk about his offce, with the coatrack in the corner. Those who have been there say there was a chair, that’s all. There’s no armchair there! You don’t go there to snooze. There you go. (Mr. Pampi, retired worker, aged 80)

It is obvious how ascetic austerity echoes the other element of the Michelin spirit, namely secrecy, with the encouraged value of modesty contributing in turn to silencing. Being “encouraged not to stand out”, in miss Guilde’s words (Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 34), means remaining discreet about one’s situation, implying a number of deprivations, both in terms of speaking and of enjoying material goods: 102 C. VÉDRINE

When my brother became an executive, a year later he buys himself an ID, a 1960s car, he gets a call and they say to him: ‘Monsieur François only has a Citroën 2CV, so if you want to get on…’ And he sold his ID. (Mr. Pimon, former priest-worker, aged 76)

5.2.2.2 Thrift: Protecting Possessions and Combatting Wastefulness Thrift seeks to preserve earnings by spending moderately without wastefulness. It is therefore synonymous with economy, although the latter’s defnition is more complex and highly political. As the art of managing a household and possessions, it refers to the activity and the economic system based on facts relating to the production, the distribution and the consumption of a community’s wealth. Economy also describes the organisation of various elements of a whole, as well as the way its parts are distributed. The Michelin company is particularly thorough in applying the principles of liberal economic policy but also in imposing a discipline of thrift. This discipline permeates the company strategies as a whole: “he [Michelin]is a past master at capitalising on all types of subsidy, tax rebate, special funds, etc. He has skilfully negotiated some of the company’s branches abroad” (Simonet 1984, 112*). Moreover, thrift as a moral value and quality is instilled in the employees through deprivation as discussed earlier, which is synonymous with economy and self-sacrifce. The economic discipline, as constantly exemplifed by the management, is an integral part of the company’s internal and external policy. All the people I met mentioned what many call the Michelin “stinginess”.

My friend used to deliver things, dresses at Michelin, well, she never got a tip. She was the only one who didn’t give tips; she was stingy. (Mrs. Voison, worker’s spouse, aged 58)

On the other hand, they are also known to be terribly stingy, a window breaks and you have to make a report in twelve copies and if all goes well in two years’ time, it will be replaced. But you tell yourself that it must be true because when you walk past the factories and you see the state of disrepair they’re in, you think, there is unwieldiness here… they always dodge modernising the buildings. You can’t make all that up. (Miss Guilde, Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 34)

Having said this, those who have power and demonstrate wisdom by preserving the common resources and making them bear fruit 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 103

(the company), or in other words by avoiding any wastefulness with their own and other people’s possessions, are widely honoured and respected.

5.2.3 The Moralistic and Religious Spirit: Moral Entrepreneurs The father fgure, the secrecy and the asceticism on which the Michelin spirit was built take their root in moralistic and religious thinking. In this respect, the company directors can be qualifed as “moral entrepreneurs”, to use Becker’s term (1963), insofar as they seek to impose and enforce a line of conduct which purports to be an example of “moral standards”, imbued with middle-class and Christian morality (Fig. 5.1).

5.2.3.1 Moral Behaviour: Regulating Male/Female Relationships and “Proper Behaviour” “Moral entrepreneurs” does not have the same meaning as “entrepreneurial morality”, as described for example by Italo Pardo (1996). In his work, Pardo shows the complex relation in which the values and beliefs (religious and non-religious) operate. He writes that, “in order to understand this relationship between culture, entrepreneurial spirit

management

hidden FATHER economy

Secrecy silence

discretion restraintthrift

simplicity

austerity asceticism discipline

Fig. 5.1 The circulation and relations between the various elements of the Michelin spirit (At the centre of the diagram is the patriarchal fgure of the paternalistic system, the exemplary “father” and educator in the Michelin spirit) 104 C. VÉDRINE and the organization of society, we must recognize the signifcance of actors’ almost systematically linking their operations of thought to the moral and normative value of their actions” […] “as they combine very different resources in their management of existence” (1996, 171). He adds: “it ought not to surprise us that such moral and spiritual values and entrepreneurialism should strongly interact” (1996, 172). Although this point is of course very important, my focus is on the “moral entrepreneurs” described by Becker (1963): in other words, I am more interested in those who produce the moral. Indeed, the “moral entrepreneur rules are the product of someone’s initiative and we can think of the people who exhibit such enterprise as moral entrepreneurs” (Becker 1963, 147). The Michelin family belongs to the two types identifed by Becker, that is, “those who make and enforce them [the rules]. The prototype of the rule creator, according to Becker, “is the crusading reformer” (op.cit.). “With an absolute ethic”, he believes “that his mission is a holy one” (op.cit., 148). A successful crusade results in new laws or in updating existing laws. At Michelin, the directors, masters of the house, are the creators and enforcers of the company rules and regulations and their “smooth functioning”. They represent the upper class, despite their efforts to decrease the social distance to their staff, and as such impose conservative standards and values on their employees. The model of the traditional family is set as an example. I have discussed this point on several occasions and will therefore merely outline it here. Women are above all future mothers and are responsible for the private domestic space and for the education of their children. In the paternalistic system, they can only devote themselves to so-called female work activities, such as nurse or primary school teacher, which require care and attention but also the moral value of dedication, on the sole condition that they do not marry. At school, relations between boys and girls were kept to a minimum, or even avoided altogether.3

3 Regarding the moral upheld by the women of the popolino of Naples, see Pardo (1996): “In a number of cases the people themselves may well overemphasize the power of either sex in household and extra household relations, but observation suggests that the popolino family is certainly not a unitary group under male authority characterized by women’s indirect but strong infuence” (1996, 44). As we will see in the next chapter, this is also the case with the spouses of the Bibs in respect of the transmission of the spirit to their children. 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 105

The place of men is in the factory, and until the 1980s, the company was careful to ensure that they kept busy through healthy activities, while disapproving of going to cafés which is incompatible with the principles of the “tidy worker’s” “orderly life” (Ambjornsson 1991). Generally speaking, the company keeps a watchful eye on the morals of its employees and, even today, certain practices such as divorce are frowned upon:

My ex-wife didn’t become Édouard Michelin’s personal secretary because she was divorced, and Mrs Michelin senior thought it wasn’t done. […] That’s what she was told, more or less. That it would embarrass Mrs Michelin senior that a divorcee, therefore a loose woman, would work closely with Édouard. (Mr. Sartel, Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 53)

As soon as they are recruited, the Bibs are warned: their private life cannot be separated from the company. When joining Michelin, the areas of work and outside work blend, the staff member becoming an ambassador for the Michelin spirit in the outside world. Anyone representing the frm must show exemplary behaviour both inside the factory and outside, where he is the safekeeper of the image of the company. The employees were often surprised when realising that a social investigation or, to be more precise, an investigation into their morals had been carried out before they were recruited:

I joined in ‘71. They still did investigations, even when recruiting. I joined as a worker, and they checked, I worked in a small company that summer, and as the head of personnel was my uncle, he said to me ‘By the way, they came to check’, but I don’t know if they always do that, Mr. Facost (maintenance agent, aged 49) told me.

The employees are thus expected to display exemplary behaviour, modelled on that of the Michelin family who dictate what is acceptable, what is appropriate, what must be done and refrained from, and what can and cannot be done:

Some things are done, others are not done. Yeah, that was obvious. My father didn’t say it but lived by it: always correct, always… you see? Right. It was all full of respect for the thing, really. […] Each thing in its place, and everything would work so well! And it did work, actually. (Mr. Gérine, worker’s son, aged 50) 106 C. VÉDRINE

5.2.3.2 Christian Morality Like most paternalistic employers, Michelin relied on religion to justify the principles governing its company spirit but also more broadly the liberal capitalist system. Catechism is taught in the company schools and church attendance is strongly encouraged. Lamy and Fornaro (1990, 153*) observe that “the Michelin family have always been practising Catholics, although we were unable to establish, as far as the successive directors are concerned, to what extent it was a matter of faith or a model of behaviour to be displayed in the public eye”. The frst assumption seems the most likely: a man (François Michelin) who is unable to put himself constantly on show, including the austerity of his clothes and weekly church attendance for over forty years, and who chooses to retire to a religious institution in old age (from 2013 to 2015). It is precisely because the Michelins are genuine believers that they succeed in imposing their moral values:

It’s a family of believers. With gentleness, like a father. I deeply believe, and it helps me emotionally. (Mr. Paris, retired, aged 64)

The fact that François Michelin’s eldest son and youngest daughter took holy orders bears witness to their faith, as do many anecdotes. The most symbolic story that I have been told is probably the following one:

When I was small, I went to François Michelin because my father was doing his room for him, a big bed, 2 metres long. And I perfectly remember that room: a big bed and above it a Christ fgure, a metre high. And nothing else. It was impressive. Only this Christ. (Mr. Dupar, Clermont- Ferrand resident, aged 54)

* At the end of this detailed description of the inherent elements of this distinctive company spirit (especially asceticism and thrift), it is disconcerting to note the resemblance with the spirit of capitalism described by Max Weber (1950), born at a time when proft as an end in itself replaces the satisfaction of material needs. The document of this spirit which inspired is Benjamin Franklin’s Advice to a Young Tradesman in which he elaborates a “philosophy of avarice” and the “idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 107 as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic” (Weber 1950, 51) or an ethos. Acquisition and proft are linked to morality since “all Franklin’s moral attitudes are coloured with utilitarianism. Honesty is useful, because it assures credit”. “In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture” (op.cit., 53). With the birth of the spirit of capitalism, work must be carried out as if it were a vocation [Beruf], a practice that requires education as work is no longer a means to livelihood but a moral obligation connected to a “strict economy” (op.cit., 63). Weber shows us that there is a connection between the spirit of capitalism and religious factors in that ethic governs the full range of practices of acquiring goods. The men behind this spirit are not unscrupulous, “they were men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at the same time, above all temper- ate and reliable, shrewd and completely devoted to their business, with strictly bourgeois opinions and principles” (op.cit., 69), like the Michelin directors. Weber also describes the ideal capitalist type which corresponds almost in every respect to the Michelin family who could be a perfect example of this: “the ideal type of the capitalistic entrepreneur […] has no relation to [such] more or less refned climbers. He avoids ostentation and unnecessary expenditure, as well as conscious enjoyment of his power, and is embarrassed by the outward signs of the social recognition which he receives. His manner of life is, in other words, often, […] distinguished by a certain ascetic tendency” (op.cit., 71). Calvinist Protestantism, according to Weber, has placed capitalism in ethos, with its inherent predestination doctrine, the starting point of an ascetic movement that itself is the source of a rationalising movement. To increase God’s glory on earth, man must be industrious in his work: “for everything of the fesh is separated from God by an unbridgeable gulf and deserves of Him only eternal death, in so far as He has not decreed otherwise for the glorifcation of His Majesty. We know only that a part of humanity is saved, the rest damned” (op.cit., 103). Thus, “the God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unifed system. There was no place for the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin” (op.cit., 117): resorting to magic to respond to 108 C. VÉDRINE

God’s grace is replaced with a rationalising of life ruled by the increase of his glory on earth. The Michelin family, although very catholic, seems to be more imbued with protestant puritanism. Religious precepts, texts and ethic are regularly referred to in the annual speeches at the medal award ceremony as well as in the rare interviews granted to the press (see in particular the next chapter). Thus, loyalty to Christian philosophy is a token of the legitimacy of its system of production, management and labour exploitation, that is based on the father fgure, secrecy and asceticism.

References Ambjornsson, Ronny. “L’ouvrier “rangé””. Ethnologie française, vol. XXI, no. 1, pp. 67–78, 1991. Becker, Howard S. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press, 1963. Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964 [1915]. Gérôme, Noëlle. “Récompenses et hommages dans l’usine. Perspectives de recherche” . Ethnologie française, vol. XXVIII, no. 4, “Les Cadeaux: à quel prix?” , pp. 551–562, 1998. Hamman, Philippe. “L’invention patronale d’une industrie artisanale. La production d’un ouvrier exemplaire à la faïencerie de Sarreguemines” (1848–1913). In Terrain, pp. 113–128, 2001. Herfray, Charlotte. “L’identité est une histoire” . Revue des Sciences Sociales de la France de l’Est, no. 26, L’honneur du nom, le stigmate du nom, pp. 27–32, 1999. Jemain, Alain. Un siècle de secrets. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits—The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York and London: Norton, 2006. Lamy, Christian, and Jean-Pierre Fornaro. Michelin-ville, Le logement ouvrier de l’entrepriseMichelin, 1911–1987, Nonette: Éditions créer, 1990. Le Breton, David. Du Silence. Paris: Éditions Métailié, 1997. Levaï, Ivan, Messarovitch Yves, and Michelin François. And Why Not? The Human Person at the Heart of Business. Translated by Mark Sebanc. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropology and Myth: Lectures 1951–1982. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987. 5 THE MYTH AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS WITH THE MICHELIN SPIRIT … 109

Lottman, Herbert. The Michelin Men. Driving an Empire. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003. Miquel, René. Dynastie Michelin, p. 400. Paris: La table ronde, 1962. Noiriel, Gérard. Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Translated by Helen McPhail. New York: Berg, 1990. Pardo, Italo. Managing Existence in Naples. Morality, Action and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pardo, Italo. Italian Rubbish: Elemental Issues of Citizenship and Governance. In Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance in the Mediterranean Region, ed. I. Pardo and B.G. Prato, pp. 1–23. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Pardo, Italo, and B. Giuliana Prato. “Introduction: Disconnected Governance and the Crisis of Legitimacy”. In Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance in the Mediterranean Region, ed. I. Pardo and B.G. Prato, pp. 1–23. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Pinçon, Michel, and Monique Pinçon-Charlot. Grand Fortunes. Dynasties of Wealth in France. Translated by Andrea Lyn Secara. New York: Algora Publishing, 1998. Pradelles de Latour, Charles-Henry. Incroyance et paternités, Paris: EPEL, 2001. Sansot, Pierre. Les gens de peu, Paris: Quadrige and Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. Segalen, Martine. Rites et rituels contemporains. Paris: Éditions Nathan, 1998. Simmel, Georg. “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies”. The American Journal of Sociology, vol. XI, no. 4, January 1906. Simonet, M. “La patrie du pneu”. Les cahiers de l’IFOREP, no. 40–41, pp. 106– 121, 1984. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by T. Parsons. London: Allen & Unwin, 1950. CHAPTER 6

Transmitting the Spirit

The transmission of the Michelin spirit, an active component intrinsic to ideological constructs (Choron-Baix 2000), is the task of the members of the eponymous family, the teachers at the company schools and the hierarchy in general. Then it is more or less carried by all the Bibs, whether active or retired, who circulate it in turn to an important part of the Clermont-Ferrand population, and to their children and spouses in particular. The standards and values inherent to the Michelin spirit are demonstrated in business conduct and in the way the workers are controlled and trained through the discourse conveyed by the company, education, space and the gaze of others.

6.1 the Values Expressed in the Directors’ Discourse and the Written Company Material The foundational elements of the Michelin spirit are transmitted to its members through the values defended by the company and are conveyed in writing and orally with the help of four mediums:

• Internal company documents, shared by all the French sites, such as pay slips, memoranda, the welcome booklet, the intranet and the publications Bib revue and Michelin Magazine.

• The annual speeches at the ritual Clermont-Ferrand medal awards by the company directors, transcribed and published in Michelin Magazine. • The interviews given by the directors to the written press, television and radio, compiled by the Works Committee. • François Michelin’s book, together with Ivan Levaï and Yves Messarovitch, And Why Not? (2003).

After reading and analysing these documents thematically, I have attempted to identify the structure of the logic of the company discourse, which has remained virtually static since its inception.

6.1.1 A Responsible and Respectful Company Michelin takes pride in being a responsible and respectful company whose declared vision is to contribute to developing mobility. The company can be defned in four points: (a) customers with needs to satisfy, (b) ideas to satisfy those needs, (c) people to implement the ideas, and (d) shareholders who provide the fnancial means for the implementation, which makes them the “real owners” of the company. The company is in the frst place responsible to its customers in terms of quality, price and safety; in the second place to the shareholders and fnally to the employees who owe their jobs to the fnancial risks the shareholders and the business owners take on the market. This responsibility articulated through what the company calls “the 5 values”: respecting customers by offering them the best quality, the best tyre at the best price; respecting people, that is, the employees fnd fulflment through work, which is rewarded with the possibility of progression in the company; respecting the shareholders who own the company; respecting the environment (added in 2001) out of concern for the environment; and respecting facts in support of progress with research involving observation, investigation, curiosity and challenging knowledge. Finally, the company’s responsibility is tested in its endeavour to reduce costs in order to offer customers “the best tyre at the best price”.

6.1.2 Industrial Democracy—The Customer Is King The responsible company is at the service of the customer whose needs ensure that mobility, and thus progress, is furthered. At the root but also 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 113 the aim “of everything”, he is the one who is actually in charge of the company. His supremacy makes it possible to justify the entire business strategy: offering him the best tyre at the best price requires savings that reduce production costs, as well as practices related to secrecy that prevent competitors from scrutinising the Michelin quality. By spending his money on tyres, the customer provides a wage for the employees. He is therefore, according to the company, the real “boss”. This “boss”–customer logic was recorded in the pay slips until 2003 in the statement “price payed by the customer”. The company responsibility, as outlined earlier is actually bestowed on the customer, including management decisions: it is to satisfy customer needs that internal policies are created, it is because he does not consume that the company has to part ways with a number of employees, it is because the company has to be competitive and offer him the best tyre at the best possible price that it has to relocate its factories to reduce labour cost. What is more, François Michelin happily explains that as the customer is in actual fact in charge, he cannot be accused of exploitation just because he is a consumer.

6.1.3 Responsible Capitalism and Liberalism Versus the Philosophical Liberalism of the French Marxist Dictatorial Irresponsible State François Michelin defnes capitalism because he identifes the assessment of actions following risk-taking. The economic liberalism to which he belongs draws on the concepts of freedom and sharing. The freedom to do business and to multiply research paths to improve the product and services for the customer goes hand in hand with sharing the gains obtained. The moral demands linked to the religious values are brought into justify the liberal economic system through an analogy between the redistribution of profts to the employees, shareholders and customers (by way of reducing the price of the product), and the multiplying and sharing of bread by Jesus. The employees take part in a collective work whose beauty irradiates the progress of mobile mankind. Pride to belong to the frm responsible for advancing a quality automotive society as well as the security of its users is thus guaranteed. The Michelin staff offer their skills to a cause which is the more important as it is just, in the moral and Christian meaning of the word, to the extent that it allows each individual to grow in the performance of his duties by taking part in social work. 114 C. VÉDRINE

Fig. 6.1 The company’s discourse map

This moral liberalism conficts with the philosophical liberalism promoted by the State that is, according to François Michelin, inspired by Marxism. The welfare state supports citizens and strips them of their responsibilities, while at the same time restricting entrepreneurial freedom through its social policies. As the French state limits the freedom inherent to capitalism by imposing costs on companies, the company therefore naturally turns to countries that leave it free to act. Finally, Marxist philosophy is all the more dangerous as it meddles right inside the factories with the trade unions who impose their dicta- torship and destroy the company in an irresponsible way. Unionism in its current form must therefore be fought since its existence, as it is, is an aberration: only unionism in the service of customers can be justifed (Fig. 6.1). * The virtues extolled by the company are responsibility, respect, risk-taking, due regard for economy, secrecy and discretion, progress, 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 115 creation and freedom, and are sacralised by the mythic stories which are frequently used in the formats quoted above to justify their effectiveness.

6.2 the Bibs’ School, Religious and Physical Education A key element in transmitting the Michelin spirit is the education of the Bibs and future Bibs. Involving at the same time school, religion and sports, this education is an infuence exercised by adults on children “to arouse and to develop in the child a certain number of physical, intellectual and moral states which are demanded of him by both the political society as a whole and the special milieu for which he is specifcally destined” (Durkheim 1956, 70–71), the milieu in this case being the Michelin company. It requires discipline, “an essential element of socialisation, by instilling in the individual the rules that will adjust his behaviour to an eminently desirable social life; this is why education must be linked to morality since they share the same attributes: constraint and desirability” (Steiner 2010, 95*). Constraint encourages assimila- tion modelled by the exemplary ideal image of the master embodied by Michelin, but also membership of and the feeling of fully belonging to the group in which the individuals operate, with its rules and customs. “Moral intelligence” makes it possible for them to accept the obligation of being educated in a moral ideal, explains Durkheim. The desirability of belonging to the group and looking like the exemplary ideal allows them to accept the disciplinary rules involved in the education process. It is because the master, with the fatherly and mythical aspects we have seen in the case of Michelin, represents the socialising institution and consequently the sacred dimension of society, that he is invested with a moral authority and power of compulsory education.

6.2.1 The Future Bibs’ School Education I will focus on three types of education institutions regarding Michelin: education centres, family home economics and schools. I should also mention the summer camps, overseen by teachers. The education centres welcomed children with social or health problems, for whom Michelin sometimes acted as a guardian. Family home economics was taught to young girls aged fourteen to eighteen, although one section was open to female factory staff but also 116 C. VÉDRINE to the wives and daughters of employees. The important thing is to be educated in order to become a perfect wife and mother as part of the moral values promoted by “the Firm”. The third type of institution requires more attention as school education concerned many Clermont-Ferrand residents. As late as the 1970s, most districts had their own kindergartens and primary schools. The gender distribution of the future positions in the company was entrusted to two schools: the Charasse school for boys and the Nord school for girls. I mentioned earlier “La Mission”, the school for technical training. To this day, two Michelin schools are still operational. The Michelin School for Technical Education [École d’Enseignement Technique], which the locals still refer to as “the Mission”, provides training for the vocational and professional qualifcation for Production Facility Supervisor [CAP Conducteur d’Installations de Production], for the vocational baccalaureate in Industrial Equipment Maintenance [Bac Pro Maintenance des équipements industriels] and for the vocational training certifcate in Industrial Maintenance [BTS Maintenance industrielle]. As to the Michelin International School, primarily aimed at children of executives who have come to work in Clermont-Ferrand from some twenty different countries, it prepares students between the ages of two and eighteen for American and British exams (SAT, AP, A level). The youngest Clermont-Ferrand residents to have attended the Michelin schools, which became state schools in 1968, are around ffty years old today. It is easy to meet former students of the Michelin schools in Clermont-Ferrand as there were so many of them. The following excerpts from interviews I have carried out show that, in many respects, the Michelin “spirit” is still transmitted today at the technical school, while the discourse of the students and teachers refects a disconcerting continuity of teaching and education.

The thing though was that they taught us morals and all those things that don’t exist anymore, politeness… I don’t know if everybody learnt their lesson but still, it’s the kind of thing that always stays with you. (Mrs. Chime, former pupil at the Nord school, aged 50)

The “hereditary workforce” (Murard and Zylberman 1976*) must be taught morals and be educated according to the company needs, which are twofold. On the one hand, they concern professional training, on the other, the shaping of a spirit of cooperation and gratitude towards their 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 117 condescending good employer, thus producing “tireless little workers”, in the words that Murard and Zylberman borrowed from Musil. The children must be willing to transmit in their current and future home the spirit in which they have been trained:

I said to the pupils: honesty, citizenship. One said to me: ‘My dad, he left fve minutes early and he got a fne’. ‘Listen, you did well to tell me that’. I take the chalk, I write fve minutes on the blackboard, times 30,000 workers. So, how many minutes is that? Hours and hours. Then they understood that it was important for their parents to be on time. Who pays for those hours? It’s a loss of revenue. (Mr. Moulins, former teacher at Charasse, aged 82)

Transmitting moral values such as honesty, punctuality and fair punishment is primarily the task of the teacher, but also of the children with their parents. The teacher symbolises and has to symbolise wisdom or, to use Durkheim’s term, the ideal, insofar as he is the master through whom the mandatory education of the members of the Michelin institution takes place. Demonstrations to pupils such as the one given above by Mr. Moulins argue in favour of the importance of the moral values commended by the company through rational discourse. Of course, the children are also taught values relating to thrift and asceticism, essentially through the equal distribution of school materials and smocks to all the pupils. I referred earlier to the meritocratic illusion suggested by this material equality, together with the illusion of belonging to the same community with its rules, practices, customs, objects, etc. shared by all its members. This is how education operates:

My father was an executive, a senior executive but between a worker’s son and an executive’s son, there was this feeling of belonging to the same family. This is of course sociologically entirely false. But I don’t know, in the end it creates a kind of common identity which basically makes you feel at ease straight away. It helps me a lot in politics. In what way? Well, as people know I’m my father’s son, they think ‘This young man can’t think wrong because he’s surely been well-educated. Like us’ (laughter). What does that mean to be well-educated? Well, it’s the precepts of the Michelin school and all that. […] You have the street names, on the estates and all that, there is some kind of moral 118 C. VÉDRINE

blanket that… shapes you but at the same time it locks you in. (Mr. Miran, Clermont-Ferrand politician, aged 52)

While for some the Michelin schools were a place of confnement or what they call “formatting”, for many others they provided a “shaping” “moral blanket”, to use Mr. Miran’s words. The strict teaching was instrumental in establishing a framework with rules, benchmarks, limits but also and especially a line of conduct that differentiates between good and evil, what should or should not be done, what one should or should not be, what one should or should not think, what one should or should not become. These benchmarks, as stringent as they may be, are however practical and reassuring in that they make it possible, in exchange for a more or less appreciated discipline, to be steered, to know who one is and where one is going. What should be emphasised here is the pupils’ and the employees’ capacity to assess what they get in return for giving oneself over to the company. It is not a matter of obedient stultifying but rather a sacrifce to be guaranteed protection and attention:

My young son has been to the Michelin school and without question, there was a time in his life where the Michelin system got him out of a tight spot, thanks to the rigour discipline and the ideas they put in his head, otherwise he’d only have a vocational qualifcation. (Mr. Gaillard, retired executive, aged 72)

It is this discipline and the “ideas they put in his head” that, while benefcial for some because of the framework, albeit alienating, they provided, were evidence of formatting for others. Many in Clermont- Ferrand speak of a Michelin “mould” and accuse the company of producing employees like tyres, through a rational manipulation and a carefully devised process in which the schools are the tool of choice of the production line.

I had a friend, he was a real Michelin product. Unbelievable. […] He was Michelin formatted. Michelin-formatted, what does that mean? He went to Michelin schools, his internal training gave him social recognition and it never occurred to him to leave Michelin, and besides he would have struggled to leave. That was the small objective. It’s there in the management. And the guy wasn’t stupid, he wanted to leave […] and pfff… It’s hard. It really felt like formatting. (Mr. Sartel, local resident, aged 53) 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 119

From structuring to destructuring or deconstruction is but a small step. And the accusation of formatting into disciplined “good workers” echoes one of the underlying concepts of the Michelin spirit, namely the secrecy that silences.

There was an iron discipline. I remember the frst time I went to a Michelin school [….] … I had just been in the army, that was tough stuff … and so, when the bell rang, I saw 450 kids at the sound of the bell, aged 6 to 12, dead silent, the arm outstretched […]. They stretched their arm out to the kid in front of them, so two seconds later, the bell rings again to go back to class and everybody went, in one movement. There as well the buildings were designed to be functional. In the space of one minute, the children got into their classrooms. (Mr. Sirier, former teacher at the Michelin primary schools, aged 64) There were 15 boys and 1 girl! [….] It was quite strict and there was one they didn’t want, who wasn’t at the right level for the class according to the teachers, so he left. When you say ‘strict’, what do you mean by that? Well… pffff… what shall I say? With marks, and all that. I know that before it was even worse because I’d heard things, some of my colleagues have done the same thing as me years ago, and it was worse. They even got paid depending on the rates they’d achieved. But the guy who got sacked was always late. So it is and isn’t strict, it’s logical. This guy was always late so that’s a fact. But then they do tell you clearly when you start in the frst year. (Mr. Ribs, former student of the Michelin School for Technical Education, maintenance agent, aged 22)

This excerpt of my interview of monsieur Ribs gives a glimpse of how the rules are accepted. The rules are “clearly” set out at the start of the course, and the students accept them when they enrol in full knowledge of the facts. They are part of the contract as it were. This remark res- onates with what older former employees thought about their working conditions:

It was very hard and strict but we accepted it. If you didn’t agree you could leave. Me, I stayed 37 years, so just as well I accepted otherwise I’d have looked elsewhere because in those days there was work elsewhere if you wanted to. (Mr. Pampi, retired worker, aged 80)

Mobilising “logic” brings to mind the lessons of Mr. Moulins, the teacher, that rely on the intrinsic values of work, such as punctuality. 120 C. VÉDRINE

Lastly, relative discipline is always cited to justify the “iron discipline”. Because “before it was even worse”, as the rules seem to have relaxed. In this respect, a comparison with other schools, both state-run or private, allows the students to justify the Michelin schools’ own discipline by their signifcantly higher academic level. The educational system is therefore assessed and accepted, even exemplifed, in terms of results:

So, if I compare myself to my mates in those days, some were at Michelin some weren’t, I think they a had a bit more freedom than us. However, at Michelin there was one good thing and that was that I had much self- confdence when I did my exams. The level was much higher than at prestigious universities. I fnished the questions an hour before anyone else. (Mr. Bige, professional agent, aged 52)

However, teaching is limited to manageable subjects, also called “exact”. Everything has to be measurable, quantifable and analysable. The teaching of French has to serve the application of spelling and gram- mar rules, at the expense of developing the imagination and creativity through essays, and of thinking through learning philosophy, which is not included in the curriculum. The silencing that allows to restrict the use of thought, potentially dangerous if used against the management, is also expressed through the discreet uniforms. Discipline, discretion, punctuality, performance, reputation and thrift are the main values transmitted by the teachers to the pupils at the Michelin schools. The well-defned framework and its rules must be obeyed and any false step is punished. Schools are a way of training workers in a professional know-how and a way of behaving at work, that is, in a spirit whose ascetic outline have encountered earlier. The individual must be subjugated in favour of his ability to produce. His thinking must be mobilised for the beneft of the company, namely the development or creation of new products.

6.2.2 Religious and Moral Education The advice they gave us as teachers, we were there to train good Michelin workers, meaning guys who work hard but without a strong trade union personality. People who ft the Michelin mould. People dedicated to the cause, with moral qualities as well. Why do we call our streets here Valour Street, Kindness Street? There was a strong religious and moral spirit at Michelin. (Mr. Sirier, former company teacher) 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 121

As Lamy points out, “the connection between the Michelin family, the factory, the Church hierarchy and the workers is obvious” (1993, 248*). Authors such as Dufourt do not shy away from exposing links with Opus Dei. In addition to the values mentioned above, the moral values of Catholicism are transmitted through catechism and daily prayer by the pupils at the Michelin school:

Religion was there every morning. There was this crucifx above the blackboard and when you came in, you had to stand in the aisle facing the crucifx. Not when you were 15, but until 10-12 years, before doing communion, you had to pray. (Mr. Bige, professional agent, aged 52)

Transmission essentially happens through the implementation of a ritual involving objects such as a crucifx, a body posture facing the symbolic object, and prayer, which reasserts the place of the Michelins in the company’s mythical system:

And on Monday morning, when we came in, the teacher made us stand in the classroom and only those who had been to mass, supervised by the teachers, were allowed to sit down. And then the others had to prove to which mass they went and where, otherwise they got punished. And we always started class with the prayer ‘Bless dad, mum and the Michelin frm.’ That’s how it was. (Mr. Pimor, former priest-worker, aged 76)

Religious education at school must continue outside school or factory work areas. The moral obligation to go to mass every Sunday morning, applied through the repressive supervision by the school teachers and the workshop foremen, follows the same principle as the one guiding teaching moral values at school. On the one hand, the children receive a religious education in order to become good workers who respect their “father” Michelin, on the other the obligation to attend mass on Sunday and to account on Monday morning for any potential absence make it possible, through the pressure applied, to affect parents directly.

6.2.2.1 Physical Education: Training the Body Through Work, Clothing and Sport The Michelin spirit is also transmitted through the education of the body, in particular through physical education. The “techniques of the body” taught through imitation “can be classifed according to their effciency, 122 C. VÉDRINE i.e. according to the results of training” (Mauss 1973, 77). “Example and order, that is the principle”, writes Mauss (op. cit., 85). The body is educated to adjust to being used by means of a technique or “an action which is effective and traditional” that must be able to prove itself and be transmitted (op. cit., 75). The body of the “tireless worker” is sculpted for work and its output requirements. Training a body stooping under exer- tion and submission happens at the same time as that of the manipulated or moulded, formatted soul according to the spirit of the frm. Michel Foucault’s work shows that the body tamed by controlling institutions, such as schools and factories, links in one single movement the “analysable” body and the “manipulable” body, at the same time “subjected”, “used”, “transformed” and “improved” (1995, 136). “The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it” (op. cit., 138) through discipline, which Foucault defnes as a set of “methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility” (op. cit., 137). Discipline turns the body into an aptitude, a capacity (op. cit.). It is the means for securing social, cultural and institutional belonging. At Michelin, training the mind and the body involves work, clothing and sport. Foucault (1980) reminds us that work has a threefold function. While being productive, symbolic and disciplinary, its physical imprint and its “symbolic function” are of course different from one profession to the next. As my feldwork did not include actual factory work, I will focus in particular on dress code and sports, which can both be seen in the urban space in Clermont-Ferrand. As we saw earlier, the leadership itself displays simplicity and discretion even in their clothes.

You can even see a dress profle, it’s totally mad! And I don’t mean the overalls and the cap. People dressed quite strictly, soberly, in sensible clothes, good cotton, thick shoes, sensible basically. (Miss Artage, Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 34)

The body is thus even shaped in its appearance and its civil clothing but is concealed behind uniformity, which prevents individual aspira- tions. Renouncing enjoyment, emblematic of asceticism, becomes part of the Bibs’ bodies, in the process offering a clue to the local population who are often able to identify Michelin employees in the public space. 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 123

Sport is another tool to educate the body. The ASM, the sports association set up by Marcel Michelin in 1911, still counts between 4000 and 5000 members per year. “We have therefore sought to steer our young workers towards healthy activities and, in general, to foster in our factory staff a love for physical exercise” (Brochure Œuvres sociales de Michelin et Cie, 1927). Practising sport aims to distract the workers from unhealthy activities in order to ensure morals and hygiene. In the Michelin schools, sport thus became mandatory and the older generations remember in particular learning to swim. The frst swimming pool in Clermont-Ferrand was an ASM pool, for the exclusive use of Michelin staff and their children. However, the stories about the swimming lessons convey the disciplinarian atmosphere in which they took place.

My mother told me how she had a panic fear to go to that pool because they were thrown into the water. (Mr. Jogue, worker’s son, aged 53) We had this really fascist teacher. We freaked out. (Mr. Gérine, former pupil at Charasse, aged 50)

Frédéric Baillette shows that sport was already advocated as a “modern form of physical education” (1991, 79*) by De Coubertin, who considered physical exercise as a moral discipline through managing urges. Sport is seen as “an attempt to improve the mechanics of the body. Each sporting discipline produces a particular type of corporeality and human type” (op. cit., 78*), while at the same time it “would alleviate and prevent” “all sorts of crime” (op. cit., 88*). What’s more, practising sport teaches rules and sanctions (Faure 1991). The values instilled are skills, competition, determination, solidarity, esprit de corps, respect for the teacher, which are just as relevant in a stadium as in a company. As Faure points out, this way the specifc values of work and capitalism are nurtured and encouraged by company directors who, even today, are often members of managing committees of sports clubs. In this respect, British social history has shown how doing and watching sport were initially aimed at “instilling autonomy and discipline into the future ruling elite” (Ehrenberg 1986, 47*) and were subsequently “promoted among the British working classes in Victorian times for social hygiene purposes and to encourage a spirit of solidarity” (Bromberger 1995, 212*). The educational role of sport through learning rules, being subject to discipline, transmitting social and moral values and “the respect of 124 C. VÉDRINE binding technical instructions” (Coulon 1991, 185*) is clearly set out in the 2003 Rugby School Charter of the ASM. From correcting “attitudes” “inappropriate behaviour”, to learning values such as duty, dignity, a passion for games, challenge, vocation, politeness, respect, confdence and esprit de corps through camaraderie and friendship; the Charter embeds the principles of the ASM’s “educational purpose” that seeks to “set an example” in terms of moral virtues. The pupils have to be “worthy” of the ASM moral principles which they represent and the chairman of the Rugby School invokes without any hesitation the founding “fathers” and “illustrious alumni” to establish the legitimacy and the seriousness of the Charter’s contents. Even the professional rugby team was taught a moral lesson that was reported by the media in October 2003: after a number of defeats, the coach sent the players to the factory workshops in the Z department, known to be the hardest in terms of physical work. It was expected that comparing the physical discipline of work with that of sport would put the situation in perspective for the players. The sport displays offered by the ASM rugby team deserve a mention as their success is immense, and the Clermont-Ferrand supporters and the dedicated spaces are manifold (stadium, cafés, stores, premises, cars “branded” with stickers, bodies “branded” with supporter outfts, etc.). According to Bromberger (1995), a sports display combines territorial- isation by making the social relationships in the stadium seats theatrical; a symbolisation of war, of relationships with other people, of life, death, sacrifce; a ritualisation through loyal fans, gestures, offciating fgures, reserved areas, liturgical calendar, sacrifces, “idolatry”, etc.; and a multiple identifcation: identifcation with a city, a region, a company, a player or a team. Because a player can become a champion, regardless of his history or social and cultural background, a sports display “shows that anybody can be somebody” (Ehrenberg 1986, 48*). Indeed, as highlighted by Jean Duvignaud (1991), sports events bring together all social and ethnic categories, better than religions do. A rugby match is also enjoyed because “competition fulfls the individualistic and egalitarian ideal of social relations in a democracy” (Ehrenberg, op. cit., 56*), and this equality ena- bles an imaginary identifcation with the player as a celebrity. The author adds: “sport is a means to resolve in a show the key undefned dilemma of equality and inequality, because everyone can compete with everyone else at any time” (op. cit., 56*). From the garment factories to the research offces, all social strata are concerned by the ASM’s fate. Each 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 125 match is a shared adventure affecting each level of the internal hierarchy of the Michelin company. This is how a device is created that allows “to break up communities of belonging […] Whether defning, dividing, controlling or recombin- ing again, what is at work is a power technology, a particular form of managing social life, targeting even leisure activities that seem the fur- thest removed from any form of constraint” (Faure 1991, 44*). It is not so much a passion for games that drives all spectators to the Marcel Michelin stadium, with its huge Bibendum on one corner, while the players wear the company logo… For the Bibs, it is more about a way to integrate a constructed society. Faure explains that, with “‘we won!’, the group celebrates its own identity, its resourcefulness, its tricks, its inventions, its prevailing views, its own social body” (op. cit., 48*), the group being the ASM, welded to the Michelin company. Finally, the Michelin spirit expresses itself in the body through the space in which it operates, moves, leaves traces, arises under the discipline in that space and stands up against it, thereby conveying in one movement and one gesture the appropriation, the diversion and the avenues for resisting spaces of constraint and control.

6.2.3 Michelin’s Grip on Space and the Production of Michelin Space The design of the industrial and social spaces produced by the company helps to reproduce and contain the workforce within controlla- ble spaces. The mythical and paternal power of the Michelin company is expressed through its spatial grip and symbolism. The spaces created by the company are effectively transmission mediums for the spirit it has constructed, with secrecy and asceticism oozing from the walls of the industrial city. Owning a third of Clermont-Ferrand land, the company appears as a true decision-maker in the city, manifesting its paternalistic and disciplinarian discourse in the space it has created and organised. Because space “implies a process of signifcation” (Lefebvre 1991, 17), reading this space provides some lessons about the symbolic meaning and representations of its grip.

6.2.3.1 A Spatial Reading of Michelinville A frst reading of the Clermont-Ferrand space looks at the social morphology, or to the “the manner in which population is distributed in 126 C. VÉDRINE space” (Halbwachs 1960, 32). Halbwachs invites us to take into account the demographic data in this type of study, such as population density, migration fows, gender and age composition, rates of birth, marriage and death—in a nutshell reproduction and “the vitality of a population”, indicators of generation renewal (op. cit.). Unfortunately I was unable to get fgures that would allow me to carry out a such a thorough analysis, since this would require, in addition to the company employees, to take into account all retired staff and all those who have been made redundant in the last thirty years as a result of restructuring, but also the former pupils of the Michelin schools and former social services employees, and lastly, more generally the spouses and children of current and former employees of the company—all of them carry to a certain extent the Michelin spirit and are the source of its transmission to the entire Clermont-Ferrand area. Regarding their spatial distribution, today this is diffuse, to say the least, and only a geographical study would allow us to put forward reliable data. Today, the company has an imposing presence with fve sites (Les Carmes, Cataroux, Les Gravanches, La Combaude and Ladoux; the sixth, Estaing, was demolished in 2005), its workers’ housing estates, the Marcel Michelin stadium, the ASM premises, the cultural site L’Aventure Michelin, which opened in 2009, and the Bibendum store in the centre of Clermont-Ferrand. The commercial spaces have disappeared from the Clermont-Ferrand landscape as the Socap and family gardens have been sold to large food-store chains. Some of the schools and the hospitals are now in public hands, others in private hands, and only a witness of the paternalistic system is able to recognise the buildings as the former Michelin social welfare premises. As far as the cultural venues are concerned, these are now owned by the Works Council. The material shapes that have remained today in Clermont-Ferrand’s landscape testify to two discourses, a mythical one and a scientifc one. The Michelin myth has its totems and the test tracks of the Cataroux factory are considered as such by the locals. This mythical object, which gave its name to the junction immediately next to it, looms up in front of the traffc coming in from the north of the city. Accessing Clermont- Ferrand from the east, in order to reach the centre one has to take the avenue Édouard Michelin that leads to the factory of Les Carmes. The street names are in fact discreet as only two main roads, besides the Marcel Michelin stadium, pay tribute to the company’s history, the 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 127 second one being the road to the Cataroux factory that bears the name Barbier-Daubrée. When arriving by air, the visitor is met by a replica Brégnet-Michelin aeroplane when leaving the hall of Aulnat airport. If arriving from the north by train, the railway line ran along the Estaing factories until 2005. Only the north and west access by road to the city are not in the grip of the company. “The tyres are stuck to the walls here”, I overheard a tourist saying, and their adherence to the ground expresses a different discourse from the local myth, namely that of science conveyed by functional spaces. Reading names considered as elements of a system (Raulin 1997) reveals a rational spatial arrangement. Analysing the body of street names in the workers’ housing estates has uncovered the spatial imprint of the company’s moral values. The names of the streets inside the factories show the same organisational and practical concern already identifed in the housing estates, with each road or street bearing the name of a location in Auvergne, starting with a different letter according to each sector.

6.2.3.2 Spatial and Social Organisation: Spaces for Discipline and Moralising Discipline is linked to space by control of its functional and utilitarian arrangement. “The ‘habitat’ of discipline is this: a useful space” (Murard and Zylberman 1976, 227*). Factories, schools and workers’ housing estates are designed from a practical point of view, as suggested earlier by the toponomy. Even the classifcation of the workers’ housing estates in ten accommodation categories identifed by letters of the alphabet recalls the use of scientifc discourse for controlling private and social spaces. The housing design of most workers’ housing estates and mining towns is based on alignment, grid patterns and fencing. “Alignment is also the technology of monotony” (op. cit., 211*), in addition to a lack of imagination in the architecture. Michel Foucault (1995) has shown how discipline results from a distribution of bodies in space, usually requiring locking up, which is not limited to prisons but is also used in convents, schools, barracks and factories. Spatial discipline educates the soul the way it trains the body. Dividing space into a grid pattern means that each individual is assigned a place, and locations are distributed to individuals according to strict criteria. Among the moralising spaces, the vegetable garden is expected to cultivate not only vegetables but the healthy spirit advocated by the 128 C. VÉDRINE

Michelin family. The role of cultivating these “havens of peace” and “little islands of morality” (Murard and Zylberman op.cit., 21*) is to prevent any risk of unhealthy acquaintances that could be dangerous for the employer. Managing the gaps, the space-time hiatus between the work sphere and the domestic sphere is meant to limit encounters or, in other words, to fght against any type of group. Although it was important for many Michelin staff with a rural background to be able to keep a plot of land in order to symbolically continue working the land on the one hand, and to supplement the household supplies on the other, the company saw to it that each workers’ housing estate had a garden, not so much out of concern for an uprooted population as to distract the workers away from any social meeting spaces. The fact that the father of the family could interact, become aware of his situation or even get organised against the employer was far more dangerous for the company than to let him get drunk in a café, which it let him do at the factory to ease the demanding nature of his work. It is in this sense that spatial arrangements refect a concern for managing social spaces. The structure of the Michelin districts is telling in this respect, as no allowance has been made for public spaces. There is no suitable place for social life, and of course there are no cafés or small shops. The few collective areas are located at the centre of residential islands so as to organise life internally, closed to the outside. Locking these areas ensures family intimacy as a “confnement space” (op. cit., 275*). With private and public sphere echoing each other (Ledrut 1980), the idea of confnement hinges on the individual and the social dimension. The main area outside work, the domestic space, is designed as the area where the family unit is to be morally corrected. By constructing these workers’ dwellings, the separation between the place of work and the place of residence is cemented. The former peasants and wine growers from Auvergne learn to live in a space that is strictly reserved for domestic life, a space of rest and intimacy. The internal spatial distribution contributes to moralising the working population by separating the children from their parents. The intimate space this creates aims to encourage a fulflling sex life and thus limit adultery and going to cabarets. “Just like a box, housing needs to ensure family intimacy as a ‘confnement space’” (Murard and Zylberman 1976, 275*) against any potential outside threat to the employer. By the same token, children can be kept inside, since they now have their own space. Keeping them confned in their rooms is to be preferred to the danger of going out in the street. 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 129

Fig. 6.2 Another moralising place in the La Plaine district: Jésus-ouvrier [Jesus- worker], one of the two churches built by Michelin in 1927 and rebuilt in 1972 (October 2015) (Author photograph)

These moralistic, hygiene-oriented, functional and disciplinarian spaces are organised in a segregated way. The estates, isolated from the centre of activity, are effectively industrial in the sense that in this process of social ghettoisation, they are not affected by urban life, which entails movement, interaction and encounters. In a way, it is an attempt to deprive the estate residents from the “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996), as Pardo shows in his work (1996) (Fig. 6.2). Of course, the residents do not always meekly accept being disciplined. Frey (1986) has shown how the workers of Le Creusot, living in Schneider workers’ estates, create compromises and tinker with the rules (De Certeau 1984). The produced space is in turn lived in and made their own. Looking at the space that is lived in makes it possible to understand how, inside these closed spaces, action, thought and imagination come together (Lefebvre 1996) through resistance strategies against the imposed order. The social history of the district of La Plaine illustrates this well: despite all the spatial control design, it has been a hub for signifcantly militant union activity. However, the residents of the Michelin estates have compromised by accepting the rules governing their domestic life in exchange for decent housing rather than resisting in an outspoken way. Many of them, however, experienced access to a 130 C. VÉDRINE housing estate as a social promotion as well as in terms of comfort, and very few have complained about it.

6.2.3.3 Asceticism and Secrecy Spaces: Employer Discretion and Spatial Management of Secrecy “That space signifes is incontestable. But what it signifes is dos and don’ts—and this brings us back to power. Power’s message is invariably confused—deliberately so; dissimulation is necessarily part of any message from power. Thus space indeed ‘speaks’—but it does not tell all. Above all, it prohibits”, writes Lefebvre (1991, 142). The industrial spaces and the Michelin family’s private residences express the prohibition of ostentation. It was not until 2002 that the factory of Les Carmes, the multinational’s head offce, was at last redeveloped, although the makeover is still rather tentative. For the rest, what the passers-by get to see are rather dilapidated buildings, a far cry from the global reputation of the Michelin brand. The company’s Clermont-Ferrand factories are the oldest, but also the most discreet and the least showcased. The building in London, for example, which is a rather ostentatious display of the company’s success, has no place in Clermont-Ferrand with its austere and disciplinarian buildings. There is no desire for exhibition in the city where power is already implied in its grip on space. What is referred to as the Michelin spirit is in fact the locally constructed spirit, since the industrial sites in the rest of the world look different, sometimes even in sharp contrast to the shape this spirit takes. It should be emphasised that Clermont-Ferrand is also the place where the management lives. Their own homes are discreet and hidden behind walls that barely hint at their living place. Although the CoursSablon, where François Michelin resided for a long time, is effectively one of Clermont’s “upmarket areas”, the place du Mazet is a working-class area in the centre of the city in which students, retired North African migrant workers [chibanis] and one of the wealthiest people in France, Édouard Michelin, live side by side. Although to the upper middle classes it “does matter whether one lives here rather than elsewhere” and “there is no meaningful social success without a residence that expresses and manifests it” (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 1994, 52*), the Michelin family cannot be accused of isolating themselves from the local population or of showing external signs of wealth in their accommodation. 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 131

Their own spaces are as discreet as their habits are ascetic. This brings to mind the description of François Michelin’s offce, a space purged of any form of enjoyment. It is therefore diffcult for the Michelin staff to rebel against the disciplinarian practices insofar as they are, or at least seem, to be implemented by the management itself. Even the places the latter visits reduce the social distance to the employees:

Édouard Michelin is our neighbour. He goes to the market. People in the neighbourhood say: ‘There goes Doudou’ because he is dressed simply. Casual, wearing jeans. He is simple, Édouard. He buys his pack of Gitanes1 at the tobacconist’s place du Mazet. And his wife shops at Gibert. (Mrs. Jogue, Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 50)

Of course, the Michelins own other residences in France and probably have a number of people in their service to do their shopping for them, although this point is much talked about in the streets of Clermont- Ferrand. Malicious gossip has it that the Michelins prefer to go to the market themselves rather than waste money by employing someone. The daily habits of the Michelin family members turn out to be of a “disarming simplicity”, an expression used by Mr. Mati which shows its true meaning here: it is disarming precisely because it prevents from taking up arms. Most of the time François Michelin would walk to the factory, just like his son, who admittedly lived closer by. The prohibitions are dictated by the management’s exemplary practices in the sense that the employees cannot allow themselves to do anything that the boss will not allow himself to do. Managing these prohibitions entails a different way of viewing and using space, legitimised by maintaining secrecy (Figs. 6.3 and 6.4). Lastly, the encounters are limited not only in the residential spaces of the workers’ housing estates but also in the workspaces. Maintaining secrecy by fragmenting know-how makes it possible to justify grid pattern practices and spatial isolation. The internal organisation of the company is a labyrinth, where each department is identifed by a letter that does not always correspond to the initial of the word referred to, for example J for acquisitions, SL for manufacturing, etc. The names of around ffty departments use this system of scrambling the identifcation of sectors for the outsider, which is made worse by frequent changes. This rationalisation operated by assigning a letter to each department, as is the case for the

1 Strong French cigarettes (translator’s note). 132 C. VÉDRINE

Fig. 6.3 The redeveloped site of Les Carmes (2015) (Author photograph)

Fig. 6.4 The austere buildings of Cataroux (2015) (Author photograph) different types of estates, is amplifed by giving each employee an individual identifcation number. Furthermore, any movement between sites is strictly regulated. A circulation voucher has to be signed by the department head to allow an employee to go from one workshop to another. Similarly, in certain sectors, everyone uses a different way to get to work in order to avoid interaction among members of staff.

6.3 the Ambivalence of the Benevolent yet Watchful Gaze The eyes are another support for transmitting the Michelin spirit. Regarding what the space produced by the company shows to passers-by, we have already mentioned the totemic test tracks to which should be 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 133 added the chimneys and other cylindrical shapes. “How can this space be defned? It is visual and phallic. It is the space and language of Power and the Will to Power; a civil and military space, masculine and strategic. The towers and monuments rise above the ground and the surface, not so much to say and do something else, as to better control and moni- tor. Thus, these vigorous and rigorous powers maintain a time of (moral) order”, writes Lefebvre (1972, 138*). Thus, “King Logos is guarded on the one hand by the Eye, the Eye of God, of the Father, of the Master or Boss—which answers to the primacy of the visual realm with its images and its graphic dimension, and on the other hand by the phallic (military and heroic) principle, which belongs, as one of its chief properties, to abstract space” (1991, 408). It is this inquisitive eye that is of interest here. Both benevolent and watchful, grateful and disciplinarian, its symbolic dimension conveys the complexity and ambivalence that binds Michelin to its employees in particular, and to the local population in general (Fig. 6.5).

6.3.1 What Is Exhibited and What Is Hidden: The Attentive Eye of the Exemplary and Grateful Father The eye plays a prominent role in the dialectic hidden/shown inherent to the defnition of the Michelin spirit. It is the secret that is hiding from any eyes but also, as pointed out earlier, the part relating to the subject. To ft the mould, one has to be discreet, discretion being precisely what is on show at Michelin. The exemplarity of the family members and more particularly of the father who “sacrifces himself for the cause” (to quote a Clermont-Ferrand resident) should be a lesson. What it seems to be and what it makes visible and legible are the standards, that is, the customs, practices and ways of being that are compatible with what is expected from members of staff. With Michelin, it is all about gratitude. Gratitude of course for having a job and accommodation. But also and foremost gratitude for the Michelin family’s effort to instil in the factory staff the values it represents itself. Here, the transmission of the Michelin spirit stands for sharing and is considered in this sense as a privilege from which the Bibs beneft. Carrying the Michelin spirit embodied by François and Édouard Michelin means being worthy of them by having learnt to “be like” them: modest, humble, discreet and with moral values. 134 C. VÉDRINE

Fig. 6.5 Entrance to the Cataroux site (September 2003) (Author photograph)

Michelin is about values. And I’m proud to carry those values because they are decent. The people who criticise don’t understand. It’s easy to knock things. Michelin is a good frm. (Mr. Mati, retired executive, aged 62)

We are therefore dealing with a twofold gratitude. Firstly, the employees’ gratitude towards the employer who looks after them like he looks after himself and secondly, the employer’s gratitude towards his employees, who are appreciated, respected and loved because the transmission of a shared spirit happens through them. The kind attention of the grateful father is, in the eyes of the local population, fully expressed in the paternalistic system. The symbolic “father” François Michelin, who happened to be the father of the new boss at the time of my research, is viewed as a fair and good man, only interested in the good of his employees. Patronising paternalism justifes social inequalities (Pinçon and Rendu 1995) particularly well as these are hidden from view. Just as the Michelin family’s economic power is absent from the visual landscape so is its political power. The father fgure looking after his employees is used to portray those who have remained simple and considerate. Even the scrutiny of their private life is seen as a kind attention to good physical and moral health from a father who is responsible for and concerned with protecting employee families that are in danger:

But then, the guy who beat his wife, Michelin intervened, he sent social workers. It wasn’t an evil, you can’t criticise. But he did know everything. And I realise he still takes care of it. (Mr. Pampi, retired worker, aged 80) 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 135

In this perspective, the vegetable garden is viewed as a blessing by its owners: “That way, they said that the men wouldn’t go to the pub. That was good, it stopped the men from getting drunk”. The watchful eye of the father concerned with the welfare of his protégés is so to speak favour- ably looked upon: “The ways of looking refer to social and political questions in individualistic democratic societies. Deference, thoughtful- ness, respect, consideration, recognition and dignity are all ways of naming and referring to every person’s need of attention for the non-visible human dimensions. Together with the right to scrutinise, to which everybody is entitled, it protects its profound integrity” (Haroche 2004, 149*). It is this right to scrutinise that is at issue here, with its links to notions of respect and consideration, as outlined by Haroche. Of course, “‘any look at anything’ is linked to issues of command, reign, power, to the issue of the body caught in a force feld, ogled, looked up and down, wrapped in glances, sometimes made to disappear because it was hit by a dead-eyed gaze” (Nahoum-Grappe 1998, 82*) and the eye that seemed caring could be accused of being inquisitive rather than respectful and honourable. Indeed, it is at the very moment that the directors averted their eyes from Clermont-Ferrand that the employees slowly started desacralising Michelin (see Chapter 7). When the employees are no longer considered with the same attention, when they are no longer the only pride of the protective father but rather the pale competitors of cheaper labour from another country, their view changes in turn and the boss is now accused of contempt. “The gaze is vulnerable as a result of the desire to be in someone’s grip, because it is an aspect of love – in fact, of any meaningful relation – where the other person’s hold promises mutual happiness and builds a common empire. The gaze is an invitation to actively accept the power of the person looking at you – it all depends on the extent of exchange. The gaze emits and receives, meets as much as it follows. But the unequivocal gaze with a grip, the appropriative look, indifferent to the expectations of the other person, the look purely using the person, tends towards enslavement. Anyone exerting this kind of power refuses to submit to the grip in return and seeks to enter someone else’s world, without recognising it, to annihilate it”, writes Denis (2004, 174*). This is why those who did not establish symbolic emotional ties with their employer have dismissed his gaze as being totalitarian. However, this does not mean that those who did look up to this gaze and submitted to it did so in a surge of unadulterated moronic docility, 136 C. VÉDRINE but in a show of confdence similar to that existing in an emotional connection. The way they were viewed was more than acceptable. It was comfortable as long as they were the exclusive recipients of this gaze. As in any emotional relationship, the caring and considerate gaze is all the more well received that it gives meaning to life. When meaning gives way, the gaze changes and becomes controlling. Holding on to the gaze of a valued and respected person is at the heart of a set of watching practices. To be loved by the father, one has to be seen to be obedient and to get into his favour, one has to be seen to be exemplary. “Provided that he admits there is a boundary in the social space that cannot be crossed (generally speaking, the position of foreman), the worker is entitled and even obliged to do everything to ‘climb’ (according to the term frequently used by the workers themselves). He thus shows that he recognises that a hierarchy is necessary and that he plays by the rules. Furthermore, more often than not value comes with the years and the ship boy who started at 13 as a ‘doorlifter’ or ‘marker’ can expect to fnish his career as a team leader or foreman, which attests to great personal achievement and a life lived to the fullest”. Noiriel (1984, 201*) made these remarks about the steel industry in the north of France but they echo the internal organisation at Michelin, where many started as workers yet ended as engineers. Equally, some engineers made it to the top of the company, such as Boulanger and Zingraff. In essence, advancement happens in one of two ways: either internally, that is, through the direct hierarchical route where the member of staff sees his efforts rewarded, or through social mobility, as allowed and done by the children. In both cases, Michelin symbolically allows growth and to “be seen” better. Good marks help to nurture the gaze and to keep it on oneself. The opportunity to climb the corporate ladder is not only a sign of upward social mobility but it is also a hierarchical and symbolic recognition of a pinnacle, of a job well done that deserves to be rewarded. This, of course, as Noiriel pointed out, helps making the hierarchy acceptable since it is possible to become part of it:

François Michelin, he really is somebody. You can only respect him. I respect the man I have known because, with my BEP,2 they allowed me to climb, they trusted me. Michelin is great. Maybe I say this because I

2 BEP (Brevet d’Études Professionnelles) is a vocational technical training (translator’s note). 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 137

used to be at the bottom of the heap for a long time, but it’s wonderful. I have been an associate for a year now. (Mr. Copthy, associate, aged 54)

6.3.2 The Surveillance Gaze: Panoptic, Merit, Sanction, Reward and Control Those in power must be able to see without being seen from a central point, according to the principle governing the panoptic, and stating it suggests how much the gaze is at stake. The architectural principle of panoptic, as formulated by Bentham, is to make the weight of the surveillance gaze felt at all times or, in any event, the possibility of being monitored at any given time. The presence of those in power must be unverifable yet constantly sensed (Foucault 1995). The panoptic applied to prison systems, as Foucault shows, is now widespread in disciplinary institutions such as schools, factories and working-class accommodation. Therefore, Foucault wonders, “is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (1995, 228). Unlike the spaces that are hidden and forbidden in order to preserve the secret, the panoptic allows to create a “space of exact legibility” (1980, 154). This gaze has two aspects. Both horizontal and vertical, it covers all staff caught in the surrounding surveillance system. Its horizontal aspect operates through a “diabolical” effect as everyone monitors everyone else and controls oneself. The vertical aspect reinforces the horizontal aspect since the structured hierarchical surveillance makes it diffcult to identify who is responsible. Within the Michelin company, spread over different sites which employ many employees, in the absence of any organisational chart, the hierarchical organisation is blurry and limited to the distinction between inferiors and superiors, between agents, associates, managers and bosses. In these circumstances, it is impossible to identify those in power and to fully trust one’s superior who is himself caught in the surveillance system: “you have an apparatus of total and circulating mistrust, because there is no absolute point. The perfected form of surveillance consists in a summation of malveillance” (op. cit., 158). The widespread use of IT tools has reinforced the presence of the gaze of those in charge (Jellab 1996), as the space becomes more autonomous in relation to arrangements for a now redundant centrality. On the other hand, time management, already a discipline tool as it times work, slowly supersedes space management since the use of computer 138 C. VÉDRINE networks allows for monitoring in real time. The “computer panoptic” (Lautier 1982*) becomes “nearly ubiquitous” (op. cit.*). Indeed, by recording and saving data, it monitors comings and goings, movements, the identifcation of contractors, time, production and pace. Such generalised surveillance systems go hand in hand with systems for assessing, sanctioning and rewarding “bad” and “good” employees. “If you want to do well at work, do as I tell you: if your boss expects you to start work at 7 am, always be there for ten to seven” (La préparation du Travail, Michelin brochure quoted by Lavaud, op. cit., 477*): “to do well at work” requires obedience and this can be rewarded with job advancement. We saw earlier that, according to Noiriel, this possibility is proof for the employee that he recognises the hierarchy and that he “plays by the rules”, as clearly set out in the brochure excerpt. Career development must be earned and this means endorsing the company spirit in the interests of “smooth running”, a “sense of progress” and “thrift”. From returned or re-used envelopes to replacing a pencil after a supervisor has ascertained its wear, there are many examples of customs and practices linked to the Michelin spirit. The hierarchy transmits this spirit by following instructions, by implementing them in an exemplary way and monitoring their application by the employees. Exemplary behaviour gives employees the opportunity to move up in the company, a recognition of their obedience and endorsement of the Michelin spirit. The appraising gaze of the line manager allows to hand out sanctions and rewards. Each employee is assessed annually on the basis of a set of criteria that go well beyond the quality of their work: there are categories for work, skills and conduct, that are assessed based on endorsement, dynamism, availability, team- work, self-confdence and… discretion, which is seen as a positive, unlike self-confdence. These “assessment procedures” contribute to a “points account” and to calculating a coeffcient:

Me, I had almost 10 coeffcients. I basically changed coeffcients every three years on average. I was lucky, my supervisor valued me, the little I had of myself I gave to my boss because in those days, to compensate, I had money, so it’s normal that I made an effort. It provided for my family. But I was being rewarded. (Mr. Paris, retired worker, aged 64)

Thus, wages vary depending on bonuses and coeffcients. The “good” employees are rewarded with a salary increase and career advancement, 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 139 while the sanction for “bad” employees who get poor marks from their line manager at their annual appraisal is the absence of career advancement, which acts both as an example and a corrective (Foucault 1995). In this coercive power game, the medal award signifes a reward, the acknowledgement of an exemplary career. All these classifcation processes have been experienced by and transmitted to the pupils in the Michelin schools, subjected to ritualistic exams bursting with power: “the examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to clas- sify and to punish” (Foucault 1995, 184). Every year, all the pupils were gathered at the prize award ceremony, with its distinction between good and evil, or between “good” and “bad student”, its symbolic awards and objects handed out as a reward, its staging, its hierarchical system and with “father” Michelin in attendance, embodying the full symbolic and mythical dimension. Even the teachers were subjected to a rating system and their salary was re-assessed in the light of their performance:

And then there was this slightly negative thing about Michelin in those schools, I felt it when I was teaching, every teacher was trying to be seen in a better light. There was hostility between the teachers. It was about who would do best… (Mr. Moulins, retired teacher)

The competition to “be seen in a better light” by the hierarchy leads to animosity and suspicion. In the race to have one’s work, and consequently one’s salary, recognised by the manager whose favours are being sought, informers are not rare:

You have to watch out for the bosses. They tell on people. They get a bonus for that, the merit bonus. They get 800 francs more each month for that, for watching others. (Mrs. Dupuy, former saleswoman at the Socap, aged 47)

From goodwill to the malveillance evoked by Michel Foucault, there is only one step—just as the gaze of the father concerned about his employees and their families can quickly become a gaze monitoring and scrutinising their private life. I have had the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the surveillance of the employees’ morals. Private life monitoring peaked with the Michelin 140 C. VÉDRINE workers’ housing estates. The separation between the workspace and the domestic space is not clear-cut. Families can be monitored in their private space because of their isolation but also through surveillance by their neighbours. Added to this horizontal scrutiny, similar to the panoptic system of the workshops which generates suspicion and informing about “bad behaviour”, is the vertical scrutiny through the presence of neighbourhood guards, justifed by their role as mediators for specifc housing problems:

There were female deputy directors who came on their moped into the estate, just to check if you were talking to boys or not. (Mrs. Chime)

The surveillance of morals, including managing the gaze between genders (Héritier 2004), consequently extends from the schools to the estates. Averting any risk of moral disorder is the role of the surveillance carried out within the estates, justifed by a concern for the general wellbeing. Thus, the robustness of the link between power, gaze and space (Murard et Zylberman, op. cit.) is drawn from the emotional ties uniting the person looking and the person being looked at. The nature of the relationship will dictate how the nature of the gaze is perceived. At times kind and malicious at others, sometimes fattering and appreciated, and sometimes rejected and condemned, it always elicits strong emotions. Between love and resentment, or even sometimes hate, there is never indifference, and both feelings always promise an intense emotional story…

6.3.3 From the Gaze of Peers to the Gaze of Others: The Recognition of Identity The modes of recognition are at once internal and external to the company and the Clermont-Ferrand population fully contributes to labelling, even stigmatising, the “Bibs”. The Michelin spirit has effectively created a system of cultural identifcation based on the distinction between Bibs and non-Bibs. The cultural identity discussed here is not to be taken in an ethnical sense, but rather in the sense of belonging to a group, “the Michelin”: the immigrants lending their workforce are an integral part of this community in which they have integrated with pride. The ethnicity is Michelin. Identity and otherness hinge on: (1) the feeling of belonging to the Michelin Firm, the myth, the “spirit”, the pride to be a member 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 141 of it and to transmit its own “way of being”; (2) the internal gaze of the company distinguishing the “real” from the “fake” Michelin, but also the external gaze which recognises the Bibs as belonging to a specifc cultural community. In other words, there is a differentiation between the Bibs and the others, between “us” and “them”, the “others”: “most groups gain some of their strength from their exclusiveness, from a sense of people outside who are not ‘Us’” (Hoggart 2006 [1957], 48). The management, however, belongs entirely to the “us” category which excludes the “others” who do not work at Michelin and have not acquired its spirit. To be recognised by one’s peers as a “good”, Michelin assumes all the customs, practices, images and beliefs described earlier and which all contribute to a certain way of being. The identifcation of a Bib happens through the recognition by his peers that he is one of them. It takes place vertically through a system of identifcation with the employer, made into an exemplary father fgure; everyone seeks to be like him and to be his worthy representative. Father Michelin is the big Other who has given his name to his employees, metonymically called the “Michelin”. If “the question of the Other seems to be an element of identity”, “this question is obviously most relevant in relation to the question of the individual name” (Benoist 1995, 17*), thus assigning an identity and assuming a behaviour system inherent to social identifcation, as expressed in the phrase “to have the Michelin spirit”. To have the Michelin spirit is to have the attributes corresponding to its specifc principles, standards and values. It means, for example, wearing “simple” clothes. But it also means having a slice of the secret that feeds the feeling of belonging to a community by reinforcing the inclusion/exclusion system between “us” and “them”. “Them” are the Clermont-Ferrand residents, whether anonymous or close relations. Because they are dispossessed of the secret, they cannot be trusted and the secret has to be shielded from their curiosity by hiding it and not talking about anything work-related. Lastly, to have the Michelin spirit means having certain advantages, benefting from social welfare which is seen as a privilege, in contrast to the “others” who do not enjoy such favours. This is why paternalism is not seen in a pejorative way by those who have known it but is on the contrary the source of a feeling of having enjoyed certain advantages. The set of ways of being that these ways of having entail allocates a place to the individual. This recognition of identity is reassuring, to say 142 C. VÉDRINE the least, as disposable as it may be insofar as it allows for cementing roots. The identifcation with Michelin allows to defne what one must be and do, thus offering signifcant benchmarks. By the same token, by being recognised as being “Michelin”, they know who they are and who they look like, which is a source of real pride, especially when “father” Michelin recognises them outside the company:

Guess who I saw at Orcines, in the car park? I was in my car, parked, and who do I see getting out of a car? François Michelin! (smile). He was there, on his own. In jeans. If I had been outside, I would have gone up to him to say hello because that’s what I usually do and he always responds”, Mr. Pampi proudly recalls. To which his wife adds: “Oh yes. But he did look towards us, actually”, and he says: “Yes, that’s true. Maybe he recognised us…

To be recognised by the boss’ gaze is precisely to have his recognition, to exist to his eyes, to have had a place. Identity claims such as “I am Michelin” match the ways of naming by the outside world: “He is a Michelin”: “They say that we, the Michelin, we all look alike, that they can spot us from a mile away, as if we’re E.T.s on Clermont’s high street. ‘Ah, you certainly caught the bug!’, etc.”, Mr. Mati says in an irritated tone (retired Michelin manager, aged 62). If identity refers to what is identical, to one’s peers, it can only be considered in relation to otherness. It is the other, the different one, who recognises me and identifes me as what I am. And the people of Clermont-Ferrand have adopted a system for recognising and identifying “Bibs”, even in the public space.

People don’t realise but, between Michelin and non-Michelin, you suss them out quickly, when they come in, physically, and that’s what is strange. The yuppies. You soon suss them out. They have a Michelin look: same type of suit, same type of man or woman, you suss them out quickly. People taking their little one out for the frst time, you soon suss them out, it looks a bit stiff. But, still, they have a certain style. (Mrs. Annau, nursery worker, aged 44)

It is not uncommon in public or semi-public spaces, like cafés for example, to hear locals labelling someone a Bib solely on the basis of the person’s clothes, or explaining that that person’s behaviour or way of thinking is due to endorsing the Michelin spirit: “What do you expect, 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 143 he’s a Michelin. That’s how they are at Michelin”. What’s more, some have turned the term Michelin into a qualifer denoting a solid, hard-wearing good quality object:

Michelin shoes, they have good old thick soles that don’t let the cold in, you can’t ruin them, you can wear them for ten years and they’re still spick and span. In that case, I say they’re Michelin shoes, they’re good Michelin shoes. (Miss Artage, Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 34)

By contrast, when it is used to describe someone, it often takes on a negative connotation: “Look at you, exactly a Michelin!”, “You’re not at Michelin here” or “I’ve done my bit, I was at Michelin when I was small so now I’m going to relax a bit!” Bib labelling by the outside world can take the form of categorisation or stigmatisation. Categorisation involves a distinction between Michelin and non-Michelin people on the one hand, between the “real” Michelin: “Him, he’s a real Michelin! Fits nicely the mould!”, and the “fake” Michelin on the other: “He works at Michelin but he doesn’t have the mentality, the spirit. At least not yet. He’s not a proper real one”. Regarding the use of the qualifer “Michelin” as a reproach, or even to indicate “blemishes of individual character” (Goffman 1963, 4), it takes the form of a stigma whose “discrediting effect is very exten- sive” (op. cit., 3). What is pointed at in this case is either the strictness, the infexible way of thinking, or the docility when the person branded as “Michelin” is sometimes accused of being “square” and sometimes of being soft towards the disciplined attitude of the “denied worker” (Hamman 2001*).

“When I tell people that I work at Michelin, they often say: ‘Really? But you look cool?’”, explains Miss Nalie. (Research chemist, aged 33)

Conversely, many people are fascinated and at the same time look up to what the local company stands for: “But we’re also really proud of it. We’re proud of these people, of what they have built” (Miss Guilde). This pride contributes to the ambiguous feelings of the local population towards the company, a mix of fascination, repulsion, pride and irritation (see Chapter 7). As for the younger generation, some mock the company, calling it “old hat” and “naff” while others hope to work there one day: 144 C. VÉDRINE

In class we’re always told about Michelin. Whenever teachers need an example, it’s Michelin. You can tell that they’re proud of this company here. Sometimes it’s too much. Even the students, when they apply for work experience, lots of them applied for Michelin and they were well pleased if they got it. You’d almost think they’d won I don’t know what! (Miss Eva, international trade student from Germany)

The Bib’s defence against the ferce criticism of the company and, by a metonymic identity association, of themselves, strengthens the feeling of belonging to a community:

I think that Michelin suffered from being a bit in the fring line, from being criticised in some newspapers […] The Michelin therefore felt a bit criticised and irritated, they would form a square, like Napoleon’s troops, and that too created cohesion because they were determined to defend themselves. By saying ‘What they say is not true!’. And you have to admit that it wasn’t true. I mean, when you went to the Michelin maternity, it wasn’t because the Firm asked you to but only because the Michelin maternity was certainly better placed than the others. And also, if you ate on the premises, you could carry on the conversation started during work. It was convenient and well organised. And welcoming, compared to other places. (Mr. Gaillard, retired manager, aged 72)

Lastly, the external gaze identifes the individual as being a Bib the day the he leaves the company because his habitus is so strongly marked by the Michelin spirit. Thus, Mr. Gérine became “Michelin” the very day he left:

At that moment I realised that there are places without yellow lines, without necessarily, how can I put it? Where they don’t necessarily look at how you’re dressed, or… you understand […] and at the École Normale3 I was really good at maths and so I was bored out of my wits! The teacher said to me: ‘Where were you before?’, ‘Charasse’, ‘OK, that makes sense!’ And the others would then say to me: ‘So, you’re a Michelin?’. (Mr. Gérine, former pupil at the Michelin schools, aged 50)

3 Teacher training facility [translator’s note]. 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 145

6.3.4 Note on the Focused and Discriminating Gaze: The Michelin Guide It should be noted that the question of the gaze is so entrenched at Michelin that their famous tourist guides owe their success to their reputation for being serious and uncompromising. It would be worthwhile doing research on the contribution of Michelin to the social construction of the French tourist landscape and the way French heritage is seen, frstly because Michelin initiated spatial reading by equipping roads with signposts and producing road maps, but also because the Michelin guides indicate what has to be seen, what should be looked at, in other words what is worth a “look” … As to awarding the famous and symbolic stars, is this not identical to the system of sanctions and rewards governing the hierarchical relations in the factories? The newspapers frequently report disappointment, even dissatisfaction, of those who have had a star taken away, sometimes unfairly in their eyes, indignant about the lack of recognition towards them; and the pride of those who have received a new accolade. The “inspectors” are exactly that and are often feared by restaurateurs and hotelkeepers keen to meet their expectations. Similarly, the classifcation system of awarding stars on a scale of 1–4 possibly entails a comparison, even a competition, among them, in any event leading to envied pride and feelings of injustice; such is the fame of the stars and the guides indicating those places that have been given any star. Thus, even in the public space, a distinction is made between the “good” and the “bad”, the deserving and the rejected, those worthy to be part of it and those who do not deserve to be looked at. Just as an awarded star is never obtained once and for all. Keeping it has to be deserved and being awarded it as a sign of recognition that the company’s fundamental values have been observed, the one most frequently mobilised undoubtedly being respect for the customer… * In conclusion, the main points to be remembered about the Michelin spirit and the ways it is transmitted are: Five signifeds match the signifer Michelin. Each of them refers to: (a) the brand of the company’s inventions, such as the tyre or the tourist guide; (b) the Michelin company as an institution; (c) the surname of the Michelin family; and (d) the directors. The signifer Michelin essentially refers to Édouard and François Michelin, also known as “father” Édouard 146 C. VÉDRINE and “father” François, simultaneously the founding fathers of the company, and the subject-heroes of the mythical stories, embodying the father fgure of the paternalistic system; (e) an iconic fgure which includes the patriarchal aspect of the fourth signifed. It does not refer to any boss in particular, but to a separate entity as a moral and mythical power. In the following chapters, I will use the terms “father” and “Michelin” in inverted commas to indicate the fourth and ffth signifeds respectively. At the root of the Michelin spirit are the father, secrecy, asceticism and Catholicism, which justify a moral, social and professional order. The company spirit is transmitted by encouraging internal company values, deployed in the mythical narratives, through education, space and the gaze of others. Each of these elements is underpinned by a discourse which at times is mythical and at others scientifc and disciplinary by virtue of functional- ism, rationalism and hygienism. The Michelin spirit is transmitted to the people of Clermont-Ferrand within the Bib families and within sociocultural, economic and political networks. Indeed, many employees, former employees and retired employees chair local associations, manage small businesses or are elected politicians. Two questions arise, although I do not have the means to answer them. Firstly, to what extent is the Michelin family entangled in its own discourse? Secondly, if being a “good” Michelin means observing the principles governing the Michelin spirit, what does being Michelin mean? Or what does it mean to inherit the Michelin name and heritage? We have already seen that, with the name transmission, “keeping the patrimony within the family over the generations does not happen automatically. It is an occupation unto itself, with specifc symbolic and economic strategies geared to maintaining and retransmitting that which was received, and to transmitting that which one has acquired oneself” (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 1998, 209). Michelin is not only François and young Édouard’s name. It is a tyre brand and “the symbol of the lineage, [it] is also an existential diffculty, a reminder sometimes too insistent of your status as a link in family continuity” (op. cit., 209– 210). It demands to be shouldered and to be deserving of its patrimony (op. cit.) and the family company’s history. Especially as one of the founders, Édouard Michelin, has developed management strategies to ensure that his name carries on. The inheritance is therefore a burden that seeks to meet expectations, and “for there to be transmission and 6 TRANSMITTING THE SPIRIT 147 reception of the heritage under good conditions, belief in the lineage is essential, and even a certain idealization, even a ‘sacralisation’ of the family which must be seen as a source of enchantment” (op. cit., 215). The institutional triad hinges on the father, the son and the wholesome spirit. The “father” derives his legitimacy from the paternalistic system that is based on “grandiose and brilliant solutions provided by the Father day by day. These solutions are modelled on the relation between God the Father and the earthly creatures concerning their sustenance as expressed in ‘Our Father, give us this day our daily bread’, etc.” (Pavia 1971, 53*). The son, Édouard Michelin, the symbol of continuity, does however break with paternalism, causing concern as to the future management of the company and his mind. The wholesome spirit is the spirit advocated by the father and fuelled by the employees; the father expects a “revolution of the spirit”4 from his employees. It is an element of the institutional triad insofar as the institution is a collective product that confers identity (Douglas 1986). Moreover, thinking is dependent on institutions since all institutions organise “the memory of its members; it causes them to forget experiences incompatible with its righteous image, and it brings to their minds events which sustain the view of nature that is complementary to itself. It provides the categories of their thought, sets the terms for self-knowledge, and fxes identities. All of this is not enough. It must secure the social edifce by sacralising the principles of justice” (op. cit., 112). “The eye of power” (Foucault 1980) is accepted in return for protection and benevolent care. When this falls away, the surveillance gaze becomes inquisitive, even malicious [malveillant], and the normalising sanction of an exemplary sentence (Foucault 1980) becomes unfair and unbearable. As soon as the father’s caring gaze shifts away from his workforce, a process of desacralising the company and the management sets in.

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4 “What we need to achieve with the employees is a revolution of the spirit” (Édouard Michelin, in Discipline et bonne volonté, September 1925). 148 C. VÉDRINE

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Between Desacralisation and Feelings of Ambivalence

The desacralisation of the Michelin company takes place in the context of the development of capitalism and the spirit of capitalism on the one hand, and of the muted traditional social critique on the other. It arises from two sources. Firstly, from a number of senior staff aged ffty on average. Faced with feelings of betrayal and abandonment by one of the founding fathers of the company, they start questioning the entire mythical Michelin system. Conversely, those who are unable to disbe- lieve, which would imply a radical change in the way they perceive their situation, keep supporting it. Secondly, from the younger ones who have been recruited by the new chairman. They are often not local and therefore not concerned with the local history and myth which they view from a distance.

7.1 resistance from the Michelin Workers— The Voice of Desacralisation The new spirit of capitalism takes on easily from the early 1980s, especially since the social movement has become signifcantly weaker. Even social classes are hardly referred to, including in the sociological discourse. There is less and less talk about the working class “whose representation is no longer guaranteed, to the extent that some famous social analysts can seriously assert that it no longer exists” (Boltanski

© The Author(s) 2019 151 C. Védrine, The Spirit of Capitalism According to the Michelin Company, Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96610-6_7 152 C. VÉDRINE and Chiapello, op. cit., 168). The hierarchy underpinning the classifcation of socio-professional categories has slowly disappeared from the media, from political discourse and portrayals, in favour of a spread of the middle classes. With the disappearance of the concept of exploitation, the “topic of denunciation” of employers has become a “topic of sentiment” relating to the unfairness of the system (op. cit., 347). By the same token, the term “boss” [patron] gradually disappears from daily language and is replaced by “managing director” [gérant], “thus the previously established is denied, and only critique can revive it. The substitution of the term ‘operative’ for manual worker’ […] represents another sleight of hand, one of whose results is to make the ‘working class’ disappear by insisting on the novelty of working-class posts, and erasing a signifcant continuity in conditions” (op. cit., 302–303). To this list should be added the “agreements on activity termination” [conventions de ces- sation d’activité] which replace the Michelin “redundancy plans” [plans sociaux]… In the light of the various changes faced by the Bibs, the new forms of desacralising mobilisation they set in place carry on from the history of the trade unions, which reveals both their timidity and their decline (see Vedrine 2015). Today two types of resistance tie in with new forms of social critique: one that desacralises the myth by producing counter- narratives and abandoning company rituals, while the other takes places in the public arena through the use of legal and cinematographical tools.

7.1.1 The Growing Social Critique Formulated by the Bibs The initial criticism about the company arises from external sources, such as the anarchist Clermont-Ferrand publication Bulletin de la bourse du travail that denounces the working conditions at the “rubber labour camp”. Inside the company, however, criticism and trade unionism are weak. The frst known strike at Michelin dates back to 1904, with the protest of bandage workshop staff against working and pay conditions following management plans to introduce fnes for any tyre deemed below standard. This isolated strike petered out rather quickly after the ringleaders were immediately dismissed. The frst signifcant events at Michelin occur in 1920, initiated by rail workers who instigated a national strike in response to the continuing low wages since the end of the war. Édouard Michelin responds by setting up a security team and declares: “the grievances certainly 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 153 do not originate from our workers who are pleased with the efforts we make for them. They do not deserve any response” (quoted by Échevin 1985, 13–14*). Édouard Michelin relies on fgures showing how weak the movement is inside the company compared to other local rubber manufacturers. Family is one of the factors explaining the issue of non-strikers. The main factor is undoubtedly paternalism and the social advantages which the benefciaries fear losing. The second factor, intrinsically linked to the frst, is compliance with the Michelin spirit, which prevents any form of challenge. The third factor, linked to the frst two, is the introduction of a participation booklet which the strikes were seeking to have abol- ished. This booklet prevented any involvement in any protest movement, on pain of losing all advantages accumulated in a points-account. The fourth factor is rooted in the company’s history as it has always miti- gated any protests; all the 1904 strikers were dismissed. The ffth factor is family: “reduced to silence in this way, the family men, fearing reprisals, returned to the workshops in silence, hugging the walls and hiding themselves, a little more crushed, a little more bowed down with each year that passed leaving them all the more vulnerable: old workers could also be frightened strikers” (Perrot 1987, 103). In the same vein, women stop their husbands from going on strike for fear of the consequences. Finally, the sixth and last factor is the signifcant number of “labourers, whom the lack of skill made easily replaceable” and “who constitute a second zone of weakness, if not of outright dissidence” (op. cit., 105). The setback and the violence resulting from the 1920 strikes were additional demobilising factors. Despite the Communist Party’s scathing criticism, accusing Michelin of feeding off social deprivation, labour movements did not exist between 1927 and 1945, in a context moreover where everyone feared to be made redundant at each change of management. It is not until 1950 that the Bibs start a vast strike to get a wage increase, without much success. That same year the trade unions implemented an entirely different strategy and engaged in a legal battle to have the rights of the Works Council recognised. These rights were not recognised at Michelin but, in the 1950s and 1960s, they were at the heart of the power game between the trade unions and the management. Mirroring the company’s social history, the employees react belat- edly and timidly to the 1968 events, with 15% of strikers. The May 1968 movement contributed to improving the working conditions as well as shedding new light on the issue of social class. The workers’ demands 154 C. VÉDRINE have become the demands of the wage-earning society (Castel 2003) with the demand for more state protection. In fact, the revolutionary attempt of the 1968 events was not initiated by labourers, who joined the movement to get access to additional rights in respect of working conditions. The company certainly feels the fallout of the oil crisis, and in 1977, the decline in sales leads François Michelin to consider reopening the factories from Sunday 10 pm to Saturday 9 pm, thus calling into question previous achievements in order to optimise production capacity. “This is the frst strike at Michelin that was not dictated by any wage demand”, remarks Échevin (op. cit., 139*). The headline of the local newspaper La Montagne, dated 20 December, ran “Surprisingly sizeable strike” as the entire workforce feared that their leisure time and thus their weekly family routine was being jeopardised. But Michelin refused any conciliation, stating that there never had been any question of abol- ishing the weekly rest period. It is only almost a decade later, in 1988, that 60–70% of professional workers downed tools following the announcement that wages would increase by 20 cents per hour. They considered this to be an insult and the ensuing confict lasted the best part of two months. This failure to succeed again marks the end of wage demands at Michelin as the Bibs are discouraged by the successive defeats of previous movements. This “20-cent strike” is a turning point as far as the reason for mobilising the employees is concerned. The reaction of the substantial number of strikers involved at the beginning of the confict echoes the contempt they are being held in. At stake are not purely pay-related matters but moral questions. From then on, demands no longer concern work conditions but the workers’ dignity, which will be championed henceforward. Thus, demands give way to indignation, becoming more pronounced from 1982 onwards when redundancy plans are announced. However, the 1980s crisis has the “effect of weakening workers’ fghting spirit and their propensity to join a union” (Boltanski and Chiapello, op. cit., 281), as well as dampening their faith in the effectiveness of union activism. The trade unions, often helpless in the face of changing capitalism and its spirit, are the victims of a non-progressive analysis of the labour market and have not kept abreast of all its changes. They are thus “slow to put the world to the test once more” (op. cit., 291) and, for the time being, can only express their anger in the case of some, or their dismay in the case of others. 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 155

In Michelin’s trade union history, we note in the frst place the low number of people involved in each of the strikes and even a lack of reaction to the latest redundancy plans. Even when the strikes are “sizeable”, they remain modest both in terms of percentage and compared to other companies, fully refecting the discretion and silencing specifc to the Michelin spirit. One of the consequences of this frst point is the limited number of cases where the workers were the winners of those conficts. History shows that there were six; two of them were part of a national movement and Michelin therefore had no choice but to implement the agreements (Matignon in 1936 and Grenelle in 1968). There have been only four victories following the company’s internal conficts, the last one dating back to 1972. The management was often uncompromising as it was supported by a signifcant number of non-strikers and was confdent that the strikes would lose their momentum as a result of the unbearable fnancial situation. In the second place, the strikes about demands became protest strikes from 1988 onwards, as the object of the complaint slowly shifted from the working conditions to defending the workers’ integrity. Incidentally, this perfectly illustrates Hanna Arendt’s comments: “The trade unions, defending and fghting for the interests of the working class, are responsible for its eventual incorporation into modern society, especially for an extraordinary increase in economic security, social prestige, and political power. The trade unions were never revolutionary in the sense that they desired a transformation of society together with a transformation of the political institutions in which this society was represented” (1998, 261). The reformist dimension of the trade unions has led to organised, disciplined and ritualised street demonstrations (Perrot 1987): strike notices, orderly processions, prepared slogans, “enthusiasm counts for less than numbers”, “the successful demonstration […] passes off in a calm, orderly fashion” (op. cit., 150). The desire to convince superseded the desire to rant, and “an expression of latent desires and repressed dreams, a freeing of both word and action, a festival of the assembled populace” (op. cit., 144) gave way to predictable, monitored, contained, and therefore ineffectual strikes. Thus, as Manos Spyridakis describes it in his ethnography on the area of Piraeus, “the agents do not therefore see the syndicate as a coalition resistance front, but just as an additional, circum- stantial means for fnding employment” (Spyridakis 2010, 161). In May 2006, there were fewer than 500 trade union members at Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand. The drop in unionised staff goes hand 156 C. VÉDRINE in hand with the decreasing numbers of workers and employees. The fghting spirit has run out of steam and has been replaced since 2005 by an executives’ trade union (the Confédération Générale des Cadres was set up in 2003 and is backed by the management) at the helm of the Works Council… Especially since the “new spirit of capitalism” that is addressed to them has substantially taken the sting out of the criticism from the workers’ trade unions, which has become powerless in the face of redundancy plans and the new challenges at work. The history of social critique at Michelin illustrates how the various forms of union resistance are now “largely ineffective when it came to acting on the new world” (Boltanski and Chiapello, op. cit., 345), using an “old fashioned” “rhetoric” (Spyridakis 2013, 171). As a result, critique is “always late” in relation to the displacements operated by capitalism: when it succeeds in setting up devices that are tailored to the new management methods, the world in which intervenes has already changed (op. cit.). The trade unions only realised at a late stage that what was called “crisis” in the 1980s was not a cycle which could be expected to end in order for growth and employment to take off again, but rather a new way of organising work. When reading the pamphlet, it seems that most trade union battles today seem to concern on the one hand employees exposed to the risk of industrial accidents and occupational illnesses (one success was having cancers related to asbestos recognised), and on the other hand citizens, for the protection of the environment, from a perspective that integrates universal values. The requirement of protecting the environment meets Michelin’s new media considerations which are guaranteed to be dealt with responsibly and respectfully, according to its company chart. Contrasting with these appealing statements is the evidence of failure to respect the environment and putting at risk workers and citizens who are exposed to high pollution levels. One instance concerns the plan to end keeping used tyres in storage. Although the company boasts that it salvages 25% of its tyres of which 65% are used as fuel, 10% are still dumped in many sites around Clermont-Ferrand. This concern echoes the new approach sought by the trade unions around questions of citizenship. Their powerlessness in the face of the impact of the transformation of capitalism and the spirit that justifes it has led union activists to rethink union struggle by extending it outside the factory walls. Alongside this shift in the unions, new modes of operation are taking shape. Faced with the emergence of feelings of treason, abandonment 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 157 and contempt, the Bibs have set up other resistance modes, shaking the foundations of the mythical construction of the company.

7.1.2 The Employees’ Response in the Face of Feelings of Abandonment and Contempt: Resistance Through Desacralisation

7.1.2.1 The Emergence of Feelings of Deceit and Contempt in the Face of “Michelin’s” Indifference

The Michelin spirit is: we bring you happiness and you keep quiet. It’s: we do the thinking for you. But paternalism is not the worst, the worst is being exploited. I prefer a guy who lives on the estate than a guy who’s starving… that’s a bigger exploitation. So, it’s not the worst. But it’s true that if you can be yourself, that’s better. (Mr. Pimor, former priest-worker)

The place assigned by paternalism is comfortable in that it promises a kind of well-being, to the extent that responsibility and decisions are taken by the “father” who runs “the house”1 and looks after his pro- tégés. Admittedly at the cost of compliance, but it means peace. The labour struggles seeking the empowerment of workers have had little impact, precisely because most of them are content with the security that a kindly “Michelin”, who takes care of everything, provides their family. This security is provided in exchange of surveillance, accepted as a token of concern for general good behaviour in the interests of each and everyone. Speaking out against the system of controlling the workforce was tantamount to risking dismissal. But equally to forgo, apart from a job, one of the best salaries in the area as well as a number of social advantages from which the whole family beneftted. When the guarantee of happiness shattered and the protection faded away with the end of paternalism and the start of redundancy plans, the employees felt resentful in reaction to what felt like “Michelin”’s indifference towards them. The caring and supervising gaze is replaced with a different gaze. Looking to the distance, to other countries and other workers, the company ignores those who stayed put and whose loyalty is no longer recognised. “The feeling of life is given to us, or rather, is validated by the gaze of others. Living with someone who no longer looks at you

1 See Note 2. 158 C. VÉDRINE and avoids your eye, is almost worse than living with someone who no longer speaks to you”, says Françoise Héritier (2004, 97*). It is this feeling which is at issue here, linked to a feeling of uselessness. Since the company no longer needs the Clermont-Ferrand workers whose numbers diminish with each passing year and whose skills value dwindles as a result of mechanisation; since they can now be replaced with machines and workers from other continents at a labour cost that allows to lower company expenditure, the question “Who needs me?” is “a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in modern capitalism” and spreads indifference (Sennett 1999, 146). The feeling of having been cheated for twenty-fve years during which Michelin alternated reassuring messages and announcements of new redundancy plans has only fuelled this feeling of indifference. “Telling any old thing to someone is to transform them into any old person” (Baudrillard 1997, 6), but statements from the management have become lies, in the eyes of the employees. The promise to retain 18,000 staff in Clermont-Ferrand was not kept. And the discourse invoking the notion of sacrifce for the sake of the company with regard to the so-called voluntary redundancy to allow the frm to recover has turned into a manipulative discourse when assessed in today’s light. The question of recognition discussed earlier is undermined in two respects. It is in the frst place about “Michelin’s” recognition of its protégés. In the second place, it is about the company’s recognition of the workers, who are flled with a feeling of uselessness since their prospects are reduced in an environment that eventually seeks to replace them. The mutual character implied by recognition has to be considered together with notions of respect and social honour, which are an integral part of the relation to the eyes of others (Sennett 1999). Yet the Bibs often complain about lack of respect. “Lack of respect, although less aggressive than an outright insult, can take an equally wounding form. No insult is offered another person, but neither is recognition extended; he or she is not seen as a full human being whose presence matters. When a society treats the mass of people in this way, singling out only a few for recognition, it creates a scarcity of respect, as though there were not enough of this precious substance to go around”, writes Sennett (op. cit., 3). Thus, it does concern the gaze that has turned away locally towards the executives, while moving away towards workers from other continents. 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 159

As a result, events that the Bibs could have seen as part of a company spirit commendable for its simplicity—as is the case for many old- timers who are deeply attached to the company—are now experienced as additional signs that their employer does not recognise them and scorns them. One example is the 100th anniversary celebrations of Bibendum in 1998. For the occasion, the employees, who were expecting a memora- ble event, were invited to take a coach to the Ladoux site during working hours. Because it was raining, they were each given a cagoule with an image of Bibendum on it when they got off the coach. Subsequently each person was to take part, with the help of a jigsaw piece, in the construction of a giant Bibendum on which Édouard Michelin’s helicop- ter would land at the end of the day. Then, in honour of the birthday of the company mascot, each person was given a glass of orange juice and a meringue in the shape of the little man made of tyres. The event was experienced as a sign of real contempt for the staff of a major global company.

IBM, the employees all got a computer. Peugeot, they got 10,000 quid I think. And Michelin, a meringue. (Mr. Camitra, professional agent, aged 50). Michelin bloody well took us for fools. We had the poncho, it was raining, there was straw on the ground so it was muddy everywhere. It was borderline humiliating, with our little jigsaw piece. Me, like an idiot, I went because I didn’t think they’d do that. I thought that for the centenary…. (Mr. Gevers, professional agent, aged 31)

The above interview excerpts show how the expectations about caring “Michelin” were crushed. Many expected to receive a present, as a token of recognition for the employees’ part in building the company and making it thrive. Comparing it to other companies such as IBM and Peugeot on the one hand, and to other Michelin factories elsewhere, fostered a sense of unequal treatment leading to a sense of injustice and intense contempt (Michelin bloody well took us for fools”, “It was borderline humiliating”). The meringue was so bitter that it has become the object of a counter-narrative.

7.1.2.2 Transgressing the Myth with Words: The Counter-Narratives

At home, when my dad spoke about Michelin, it was terrifc, it was wonderful. […] It was later, when… with the redundancy plans, when they 160 C. VÉDRINE

kicked him out on compulsory early retirement, he started talking and telling us things… Before, maybe he was thinking that things at Michelin weren’t pretty, but he didn’t say it. (Mr. Bige, professional agent, aged 52)

We remember Mr. Pimor’s comment: “The Michelin spirit is: we bring you happiness and you keep quiet”. It is precisely when the company no longer makes the workers happy, and when both mistrust and a “defcit of legitimacy” (Pardo and Prato 2010, 13) arise, that they start desacralising it. The ongoing process involves transgressing silence, a fundamental prohibition of the mythical Michelin system. It stems from three sources: frstly, the people of Clermont-Ferrand with close or loose ties to the local history of the company, who are the repository of the testimony of a family member, a friend, a neighbour, etc. In the second place, from an increasing number of workers, victims of a sense of contempt. Finally, from retired staff, a smaller group, who felt free to speak after “father” Michelin left. Admittedly, most executives and a signifcant number of workers resist this process. The workers, still viewing the events from the last few years with disbelief, refuse the possibility of parental betrayal. They are the ones who justify and excuse the decisions of the unassailable “Michelin” with arguments relating to the enemy fgure, the competitor, and to necessary sacrifces for the sake of the company. Their ability to forgive refects simultaneously the effectiveness of the mythical Michelin construction, which provides a justifcation for the company policy, and how it is no longer possible to not believe the myth. This would suggest (a) rethinking what seemed to be the employer’s genuine esteem for and recognition of his employees; (b) reconsidering the employees’ place in the “frm”; and (c) preventing a smooth end of career for the old-timers, tainted by the feeling of having been misled for more than thirty years of commitment to the company. Transgressing the myth with words happens when speaking up against the working conditions, which are still closely linked to the second spirit of capitalism. Whereas the local population accuses, broadly speaking, a system that “breaks” people, the employees condemn the pace of work and the relations with the hierarchy. They talk about the “power of the tin-pot dictators” and a system of “divide and rule”.

It takes the biscuit to have to bring back a used pencil in order to get a new one. It’s just depressing, it’s… it destroys your personality. I work 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 161

for the number one French multinational and I have to bring back my used pencil. I’m an executive. That’s the Michelin effect. (Mr. Sartel, Clermontois, 53 ans) It’s not necessarily the people in important positions who have this particular mindset. […] Like somehow they had to take their revenge. As if they were made from the same model. They tickle the employees, they nag them. They’re jumped-up little bosses. It’s an unhealthy game. They wind the employees up and complain to the managers. It’s miserable. (Mrs. Dupuis, former Socap Michelin employee, aged 47)

Generally speaking, the employees condemn the lack of recognition, the silencing strategies through intimidation, the system of informing on others, the walling off as a result of corporatism and the tension with the lower hierarchy consisting of workers seeking “revenge” following a promotion, as Mrs. Dupuis put it. Desacralisation does not happen merely by denouncing working conditions and a spirit that is no longer endorsed. As a matter of fact, myth transgression by speaking out has always existed in the context of trade unions. The process that I seek to describe involves putting forward a set of counter-narratives produced by the employees. Counter-narratives refer to episodes that demystify and desacralise, thus debunking the company’s mythical stories or portraying a company that looks down on people. The contents of the mythical stories are suspected of having been embellished and of being untrue. “Myths die when the shock is too severe and the break too signifcant. The group dismisses them as lies, tales or poetry”, according to Patrice Bidou (1991, 499*). In other words, “a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such” (Lévi- Strauss 1963, 217), yet the episodes that together make up the Michelin mythical corpus appear to be undermined. Here, the myth takes on its full Platonic meaning and lapses into a tale or legend. For example, the story according to which General de Gaulle was prevented from accessing the factories is being called into question. Narratives that conclude with questioning the authenticity of the contents of the mythical episodes will be referred to as demystifcation narratives, as illustrated by the following example concerning François Michelin:

Those stories make me smile a bit now. I think that… I know people in good jobs who have a nice car but don’t give a toss. He’s free to do what he wants, he’s a nice guy, if he wants to come in his 2CV, I couldn’t care 162 C. VÉDRINE

less. My boss bumped into Édouard whilst skiing and said to me ‘I was surprised to see him skiing with his children, I thought he’d surround himself with security people’. Well, he was just skiing! (Miss Nalie)

In parallel to this type of stories, the employees nowadays produce desacralising narratives. Although not yet weighing up to the mythical narratives, they are however conveyed to the local population (parents, friends, neighbours, etc.), thus fuelling the desacralisation process of which they are part. I have identifed 9 types of narrative: (1) the introduction of the C3M manufacturing process; (2) “the list of 189” escorted back home by taxi; (3) the 1999 “Michelin case”; (4) the broken promise to keep 18,000 staff at the Clermont-Ferrand factories; (5) the eventual disappearance of workers; (6) the arrival of Édouard Michelin, “the American”; (7) the 20-cent strike; (8) Bibendum’s 100- year birthday celebrations; and (9) Michelin, the accomplice of “La Cagoule”. The frst fve are directly related to the roots of the redundancy plans, such as the introduction of C3M; to their consequences, such as the disappearance of workers; or to the national reactions they provoked, such as the “Michelin case”. The sixth episode is indirectly linked to the redundancy plans and refects the worries created by the American management, which could give rise to a further workforce reduction. The seventh and eighth reveal the company’s dismissive attitude towards its employees, the 20-cent episode moreover belonging to recent campaign memory. As to the ninth, it was until that moment one of the company taboos. It reappeared with the transgression of silence and took such proportions that a majority of local residents who did not know the story are now familiar with it. These narratives mainly circulate in verbal form. However, the two most recent books written about Michelin during the period of my research carry titles that break with previous ones: Dufourt’s The True Michelin Scandal [Le vrai scandale Michelin], published in 2001 concerning the “Michelin case” and Myths and Realities [Mythes et réal- ités], published in 2005, written by Martinet, a unionised worker and deputy mayor of Clermont-Ferrand. The desacralisation narratives are all addressed in this work and, for the frst time ever, a whole chapter is devoted to the Balaclava episode. On Saturday 11 September 1937, two bombs exploded at the headquarters of the Confederation of French Employers [Confédération générale du patronat français], killing two 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 163 police offcers, and at the headquarters of the Union of Metalworking Industries [Union des industries métallurgiques]. The perpetrators came from a movement “composed of a heterogeneous grouping of right-wing extremists […]. This was the clandestine movement branded ‘Cagoule’ (literally ‘hood’), especially by its adversaries”, explains Lottman (2003, 173). The aim was to blame these attacks on the com- munists to encourage the country to get rid of the left, considered to be too troublesome as la Cagoule’s plan was to put in place a fascist regime after a coup d’état. The Cagoule men were arrested in January 1938. On 5 January, workers at Michelin found truncheons in the Carmes, Cataroux and Estaing factories and the company’s involvement in the underground movement was brought to light by its direct payment of 1 million Francs to the group and the involvement of employees in the attacks. In the context of desacralisation, the hushed-up Cagoule episode therefore takes on a new dimension. By accusing Michelin of being a fascist, it amplifes the complaints about working conditions and the company policy in general. The desacralisation narratives effectively allow notions and counter values to be mobilised, which are opposed to the values carried by the mythical stories. They can usefully be divided in four categories:

– Notions linked to the departure of the “father”: abandonment, lack of recognition, disappearing workforce, mechanisation of worker skills, uselessness, de-skilling, vulnerability and social insecurity; – Notions linked to the broken promise: trickery, deceit, betrayal and scandal; – Notions linked to indifference: contempt, humiliation and lack of respect; – Notions linked to fascism: authoritarianism, totalitarianism, racism and sectarianism.

It goes without saying that the counter-narratives, just like myth transgression, are not new. They have always been part of a culture of activism and resistance. What gives them a hitherto unknown depth is the fact that they are narrated by an increasing number of employees and local residents. They are now integrated into a social memory that needs to embed these types of episodes in order to digest a more or less painful shared history. 164 C. VÉDRINE

7.1.2.3 The Rejection of Distinctions and Institution Rituals Desacralisation is also expressed in practice. During the last ffteen years, the award and institution rites have been increasingly refused or deserted. The sacralised Red Guide has faced criticism that has rocked a mythical institution in the eyes of the people of Clermont-Ferrand. The award of Michelin accolades is increasingly challenged. Some restaurateurs have given their stars back. Matthias Dahlinger, a chef at a German restaurant, returned his as he refused the fnancial sacrifce required to retain them. Questions are raised about the legitimacy of the inspectors’ assessments and the harshness of the Red Guide in general. The fact that some chefs choose to offer their customers good food without the opinion and the prestige of a Michelin reference undermines the Guide as an institution as it no longer appears to be unanimously accepted by the professionals. Inside the company, the award ceremonies have recently been deserted by a number of employees. Almost half of the workers refuse an accolade from a company that no longer recognises them. For those abandoned by the “father” who no longer attends the ceremonies, receiving a medal, which “materialises the bond of loyalty, rewards confdence, pays tribute, marks a territory of relations and belonging” (Gérôme 1998, 552*), is out of the question. As they feel uncou- pled from their belief community, they are unable to take part in this institution ritual, an occasion that mobilises the company’s mythical stories. Refusing a medal amounts to refusing to be integrated as a loyal member of the “frm”. As the company is no longer the communal frm to which one proudly belonged and which allowed to forge recognition modes, the institutional event loses some usefulness and meaning. The rite creates an identity for the employee, imposes a “social essence”, a “right to be” but also “how he should conduct himself as a consequence” (Bourdieu 1991, 120). Deserting it therefore signals the refusal to belong to and to be reminded of one’s duties by an institution that no longer offers protection or a benchmark for identity construction. This is how counter-ceremonies are born, like the one related below by Mr. Camitra. They do however represent the need to mark, albeit not in a neutral space as it concerns the doorstep of the Cataroux factory, what still is an anniversary date. Nevertheless, they show staff autonomy in dispensing with the management award, choosing instead to share bread and wine with their colleagues. 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 165

At the medal ceremony that year, more than 50% of the workers didn’t join in. The other guy [Édouard Michelin] was really cross! But ten years ago, you couldn’t do that. If you didn’t take part, they’d really point the fnger at you. Me, I didn’t go. With some mates, we had some drinks to celebrate our thirty years at the company. We did that at the factory gates. We got quite a lot of food. We invited the people who came in and out to have a drink with us. But without any union involvement.

7.1.2.4 A New Generation Detached from the Local Spirit and Myth As we have seen, the new generations recruited by Michelin are mostly unconnected to the local history and myths. The increase in the number of managers from different parts of the world happens against the background of a slowly emerging local desacralisation process. Generally speaking, aside from the generational conficts that every company faces, the young managers make a clean break with the local Michelin myth, while the younger workers, like the older ones, complain about a lack of recognition. It is important to emphasise the local dimension of the myth, as its national, even international, dimension is nurtured for and by the managers. This point will be discussed later. As to the workshops, they become increasingly empty as they age since the communal “us” loses its meaning for the older generation who are no longer able to pass on their know-how to almost non-existing successors.

When I arrived at Gavranches, I was twenty. It was going well at frst. It lasted for a year and half and then they no longer needed me there so they sent me to the handling department at Cataroux, and I’ve been there since ‘94. And I’ve been doing the same thing since ‘94. I’ve asked to move, you see, they always ask at the end of the year if you want to move, and I’ve always said yes. Happy to do training, anything, but actually when you’re open like that, they’d rather leave you where you are working. […] The old ones are dragging their feet because they’ve had enough, and you, you’re twenty/twenty-fve, you’re full of beans, so you work, you get to work on time and all that. Two months in, when you see what the others do, you quickly learn the tricks. Me, I’m like an old man. Maybe I walk quicker in the corridors, but that’s all (laughs)! (Mr. Gevers)

The younger workers, also demotivated and with no ties to the company whose history and myth are met with indifference, or even irony, either leave the company or do their work without any hope of promotion. The desacralistion of the company by the younger generation 166 C. VÉDRINE can be seen in the way they refer to François Michelin: not as “father” or François” but as the “old man”, a term also used by the older ones, thus engaging in the same process. As for Édouard Michelin, he remains “the boss” like any other boss for the younger workers but “the son” for the older generation. The term old man does not mean the same thing to everyone. For the older employees, it refers to the man who has fallen from his pedestal for having betrayed them. In the eyes of recent employees, it stands for the former head of the company, the “boss” of the company “oldies” who are acculturated to the frm’s spirit and flled with nostalgia for a social framework they consider to be outdated. Identifcation has shifted from father to work for these new generations, and the new company identity discourses, based on excellence, competitiveness, quality and international reputation, are geared towards them. * Before continuing with the forms of resistance developed by the Bibs, it is worth remembering that:

– The gaze of the father has tumbled and, more generally, the “Michelin” gaze has moved towards other continents. This averted gaze, as outsourcing and investing abroad suggests, has generated a feeling of abandonment, of contempt even: the job cuts in Clermont-Ferrand are experienced as a genuine betrayal. Even the end of career progression opportunities has stopped the workers from looking at their employer with indebtedness and gratitude. In this context, behind the nostalgia of the all-inclusive care they used to receive, the Bibs, now waiting for retirement, feel resentment and spite. – According to Italo Pardo and Giuliana Prado, “a key task of governance is to establish and nurture the connection with citizens ‘values, needs and expectations, the strength of which depends upon the observable quality of the link between political responsibility and trust and authority in the exercise of power” (2010, 1). When this link is eroded, the fgure of authority is also weakened as mistrust leads to questioning his credibility (G. B. Prato 2012) and in the case of Michelin, his mythical dimension is desacralised. – The workers, aware that the company can do without them, feel helpless now that they have look after themselves. The autonomy 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 167

that the young managers have demanded for so long, and which as we saw earlier is not unfounded, is actually something the workers struggle with, as with the disappearance of an element of the structuring Michelin spirit, they have lost protection, security and reference points. – The demands for security and recognition emerge as the gaze moves away. Similarly, as soon as these demands seem to become pointless and the gaze has turned away once and for all, the workers, feeling unfairly treated and scorned, start desacralising the company. This process is refected in different resistance modes that break the silence taboo.

7.1.3 Speaking Out and Becoming Visible to Regain Recognition in the Public Arena I started as an automation repair mechanic. And the frst two years, everything was OK, you see? When I saw what they did to people… It’s unbearable, what they make them do… One day I saw a guy making van tyres, they had to make maybe 50 to make a living, and if they made 52, they earned a bit more. And this guy, he must have needed the money, he was trying to make as many as possible. And then one day I found him on his knees behind the machine. I said: ‘Surely, you can’t damage people like that’. Also, the frst two years, when I saw plaques saying ‘so and so who died aged 66, etc.’, I thought: ‘It’s the factories that damage people, you have to fght against them’. (Mr. Bige, professional agent, aged 52)

Whether it is through union activities or counter-narratives, it is always about justice and injustice, fair and unfair, legitimate and illegitimate (Pardo 1996), notions that refer to bearable and unbearable, moral and amoral, acceptable and unacceptable. If there is a scandal, this is because the limits of what is acceptable seem to have been overstepped. And if there is a feeling of being treated with contempt, it always concerns a lack of recognition which is considered unfair because the greatness of the workers and their work is disregarded. As mentioned earlier, Boltanski and Chiapello identifed four sources of indignation generated by capitalism. Each source appeals to the notion of injustice and establishing a new spirit of capitalism seeks precisely to lay the foundations of “a new ordinary sense of justice” (2005, 92) allowing each individual to thrive in the exercise of his job. 168 C. VÉDRINE

Since 2001, the new ways of combatting these different forms of injustice have generally taken a path that was until then tentative or altogether new. Faced with the failure of union action that has become obsolete, new modes of action have effectively taken shape with an instant public scope: calling on the legal system, and the use of video, the new weapon and tool for expression and dialogue between the Bibs, the people of Clermont-Ferrand and the company since Jocelyne Lemaire- Darnaud’s documentary flm Paroles de Bibs [Bibs’ Words] (2001). The appropriation of public space has thus moved from taking ownership of the streets during the demonstrations of discontent directly aimed at the company, to the appropriation of the courts and cinemas by turning to legal and civil society with a demand for justice addressed to Michelin. These new ways of engagement are part of a public space that is different from the streets, which should be understood in the meaning that Habermas (1988) gives to it, as giving publicity to. The media impact of cases that have become public is indeed signifcant. These new ways also come within the scope of political acts. Firstly, because they represent a sudden move into public space, but also through the use of action and words as required by Greek Aristotelian political activity and society. The two channels through which the Bibs publicly accuse the company of various injustices, namely the legal system and video, entail a transgression of the code of silence by speaking out—as indicated by the title of the documentary flm—and once more raise the question of the gaze with a demand to be recognised. “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world” (Arendt, op. cit., 179), reclaiming their dignity in the process. Faced with the Michelin company policy, there are two resistance modes other than those traditionally devised by the trade unions: in the frst place, those that result from day- to-day resistance modes with their tactics and strategies (Foucault 1980) which reveal “poaching in countless ways” (De Certeau 1984, xii) and of fashioning daily life. Appropriation, diversion and creativity are “ruses”, that “pushed to their ideal limits compose the network of anti discipline” (op. cit., xv). The logic of these practices requires know-how or ways to “make do” (op. cit., 18) which I will not go into here. In the second place, modes that spring from denouncing injustices, leading to a demand that either justice or injustice be acknowledged. 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 169

7.1.3.1 Mobilising the Legal System to Dispense Justice Going to court actually demonstrates the acknowledgement of injustice and the demand that justice be done. Italo Pardo and Giuliana Prato have clearly shown the complex links between legitimate and illegitimate, and between the legal and the moral (Pardo and Praro 2010; Pardo 1996). François Dubet (2005) shows how the actors, in this case the workers, stand up as “moral subjects”, the driving force behind certain normative or legitimate actions that allow them to describe the inequalities and the injustices they suffer from, based on a theory of “unfair inequalities”. Aspects of work, such as status, exchange value and creative activity, refer to the three principles of justice, namely equality, merit and freedom. The principle of equality assumes that work is seen as an integration factor conferring a social status and position. Work leads to injustice as soon as it generates exclusion and contempt. Despite the division of labour, in a democratic society work “leads to social participation, which is the condition for a more fundamental equality. In other words, work tends towards a horizon of justice that exceeds the mere experience of work when it concerns the place of the worker in society and in a widened solidarity” (Dubet 2005, 498*). Dubet reminds us that the initial action taken by the workers was democratic. Their fghts concerned worker access to a range of rights as citizens and equal human beings: the right to strike, trade union rights, etc. by engaging in a “transformation of the ‘formal’ equality, promised by the democratic revolutions, into a ‘real’ equality” (op. cit.*). In this sense, a guaranteed social protection or minimum wage, for example, concerns the question of what Dubet terms “tolerable inequalities”. The frst kind of injustice is about inequality that is perceived as unfair in that it “clashes with my (our) idea of a fair hierarchical order” (op. cit., 499*). It is fair that long-standing employees earn more than new employees, or that graduates earn more than employees without a degree, because this kind of fair hierarchy respects “the positions of rights and duties” (op. cit., 500*). However, it is not fair that unionised employees are paid less than non-unionised employees. In short, the feeling of injustice does not stem so much from the fact that democratic equality does not annihilate hierarchy inequalities, which ultimately are seen as fair, but rather from the fact “that legitimate hierarchical inequalities have been infringed”. This infringement triggers de facto “a moral kind of criticism since what is at stake is basic social cohesion” (op. cit., 170 C. VÉDRINE

501*). In other words, the feeling of injustice is fuelled by excess, or going beyond what is acceptable in terms of inequality. Fair inequalities underpinning the merit principle, which sees work as the exchange of a strength for an income, draws on the fairness of the tests set for entrance exams, bonuses, etc. Merit becomes a moral good when it serves the common good, contributes to the common wealth by changing “private selfshness into a collective virtue” (op. cit., 506*). When selfshness is no longer a collective value, it is accused of being at the root of injustice. The lawsuit brought against Michelin following the announcement of the 1994 redundancy plan should be seen in that light. At the time, the trade unions accused the company of being unable to justify the job cuts, in view of its record high fnancial results in recent years. The case was dismissed and the employees were left without any response to their feelings of injustice generated by selfsh corporate interests, promoted at the expense of the workers who were excluded from both economic and symbolic wealth (in view of Michelin’s prominent role in global technology development). Although Dubet favours the autonomy principle for being closer to the categories of actors, the freedom principle entails that work is considered as a matter of ethics, within the meaning suggested by Weber. But, more generally, as allowing personal fulflment through the creation of a piece of work and by the same token offering social gratifcations. Therefore, any professional situation or relation that compromises autonomy and creativity at work by undermining dignity is seen as unfair. The feeling of being scorned in terms of self-fulflment through work is based on a subjective assessment standard, since “a ‘sense of injustice’ is felt” (Nahoum-Grappe 2003*). Both physically and mentally alienating working conditions, clashing with the workers’ desire for emancipation, and “personal autonomy and fulflment” (Dubet 2005, 508*), are thus criticised and denounced. The justice principle of autonomy is at the root of three lawsuits brought against Michelin. The frst case concerned the employees’ demand that the Works Council be recognised and that it be given autonomy—or free space. The second case revolved around the words “price payed by the client” on pay slips; deleting these words would restore fairness to the allocation of pay elements and by the same token to employee autonomy. The last case involves claims of moral harassment. Between 2001 and 2006, three employees won a court case. For the frst time, albeit supported by the CGT trade union as a civil party to the proceedings, the Bibs confronted the company on their own 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 171 to demand acknowledgement of the infringement of their dignity in the workplace. These three justice principles—equality, merit and autonomy—are interconnected. Autonomy can only be criticised, for example, in the name of equality and freedom: because the workers are harassed, they are not treated like the others and are unable to thrive in their work. Most of the time, the actors create an “intermediary justice” by applying, “without knowing it, the Rawls principle according to which an inequality is tolerable when it avoids an even greater inequality” (op. cit., 516*). According to Dubet’s hypothesis, feelings of injustice “are supported and justifed by more essential principles”. If “one fumes”, it is “because, beyond disregard for the rules, more essential principles have been affected that are so vital that one’s most intimate identity has been hurt”. It is therefore no coincidence that the demand for acknowledgement is a recurring element in the Bibs’ discourse and in the various legal claims against Michelin. Contempt is an affront both to the equality principle and to the autonomy principle. Court action effectively expresses the demand that the insult be acknowledged. The legal system is being asked to judge in the sense of “settling a matter, with a view to putting an end to uncertainty” in order to ensure public peace (Ricœur 1992, 20*). It is about dealing with the injustice underpinning the confict by assessing and evaluating the damage, and by bringing the actors concerned to an agreement (op. cit.). Mobilising the legal system is therefore a means for making demands for public acknowledgement of the injustice on the one hand, and for the need for compensation by punishing the culprit on the other. When the employees, whether unionised or not, bring a lawsuit against Michelin, it always concerns infringement of legal and social rules. In a democratic context, honour cannot be defended through vengeance but through the mediation of a legal third party (Nahoum- Grappe 2003). The aim is not to make the Michelin directors suffer, but to have public society acknowledge that they were wrong and that their practices are unfair. When the outcome of legal action favours the plaintiffs, their dreams of revenge can be erased by granting compensation for the damage inficted and forgiveness to the losing party, which has now been punished. By contrast, if the case is resolved to the disadvan- tage of the plaintiffs, the feeling of injustice grows, as does the feeling of affront to the dignity, which not only they did not recover but which has 172 C. VÉDRINE actually been trampled because its infringement has not been recognised. This is perfectly illustrated by the trade union discrimination lawsuits. These court cases are in essence a form of protest with wide media coverage which has brought it into the public eye. This led to a double outcry of public opinion. The frst outcry came from the supporters and sympathisers of the cause of a minority that is the victim of injustice and discrimination, and whose rights and dignity have been trampled. The second outcry came from those supporting the management discourse and denying the unequal treatment of employees, outraged by the unfair accusations against their boss. The frst group consist of Michelin employees, Clermont-Ferrand residents or French citizens, who read and listen to the national press. The second group includes Michelin employees, guardians of the Michelin spirit, neither unionised nor on strike during the episodes of internal crisis. Two justice principles are at work here, namely equality and merit. It would seem that what until then had been perceived as fair inequality at Michelin had become unfair when the realisation struck that bringing a lawsuit could be an effective weapon for union struggle:

You know, in the past, it was a bit naff, those unionised colleagues, anyway when you choose to be union rep, you know you’re going to be penalised and that anyway it’s part of the contract, and that’s normal. On top of that you get penalised, which means we’re better. That argument is totally wrong to my mind, but that was the argument. And then there was the Peugeot case. They won and it snowballed. (Mr. Cédis, professional agent, aged 58)

It is fair, or “normal”, for union activists to be discriminated at Michelin as the company’s internal regulations are clear in that respect. Moreover, it is fair to be treated differently, precisely because activists are not like any other employee: they sacrifce their wages to defend the rights of everyone. Their greatness or merit makes them “better” and potentially makes heroes out of them. It is however unfair not to receive equal pay for equal work. What used to be a fair injustice became unacceptable when, in 2001, the courts set up a legal framework, giving union members access to the justice system, which has proven effective as shown by the cases won by Peugeot employees. Before society acknowledged that the victims of trade union discrimination were treated unfairly, which made compensation for damage possible, union activists 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 173 had to make do with the internal regulations by modifying them in their favour as merit regulations. The merit of union members, by now armed with legal tools, has in turn shifted to signify the bravery to face Michelin in a legal arena. By the same token, this shift confers them a new greatness by providing them with a new struggle, in a context where they feel powerless to deal with the impact of new management methods. Union discrimination fnds expression in an unequal system of sanctions and rewards, which allocates a coeffcient linked to each position and appraises the points-accounts matching the savings that the employees receive on retirement. Union members and strikers, labelled as “negative people”, are punished by the hierarchy that is in charge of wage increases and the number of points awarded. The union discrimination lawsuits therefore relate to the freeze of wages, coeffcient and points-accounts since the unionists’ militant activities. Several cases have been won on this account (for more details, see Védrine 2015), marking a simultaneous public acknowledgement of the existence of trade union members within the company, the unfairness of unequal pay, the disregard of their merit in career development offers and the compensation for damage covering the entire period of union involvement.

7.1.3.2 Demanding and Restoring Justice Through the Filmed Word, or Video as the Other Gaze: A New Weapon and Tool for Dialogue Between the Bibs, the Clermont-Ferrand Population and the Company We will deal here with speaking out in the public media space of media and its effects, outside union action. The frst time, it happened in writing when, in 1998, François Michelin published a book of interviews entitled And Why Not? This publication was greeted with considerable interest from the French press. The second event, which sparked just as much interest from the press, echoes the frst. It took place as the Michelin workers from Clermont-Ferrand reacted on screen to their employer’s statements in a documentary flm released in November 2001, with the title Bibs’ Words [Paroles de Bibs]. The director Jocelyne Lemaire-Darnaud gave the workers the opportunity not only to use a new medium to break the code of silence, but equally to appear in public—in the sense of becoming visible—on cinema screens and in public debating arenas such as universities or the media. Here, actions are linked to words through testimonials, a connection suggested by the title of the flm itself. The fact of appearing in public 174 C. VÉDRINE to talk about the way the company operates internally certainly had an effect. The frst result was reclaimed dignity and the delight of speaking, which had too often been hindered. Since François Michelin already enjoyed a wide audience, Jocelyne Lemaire-Darnaud wished to make a flm about “speech being legitimate”, as she stated on various occasions in the press. It is “like a date with the workers which society constantly defers”, as well as “an extension of the feld of c” for union members, and a right to speak for non-union members. ombat. The book And Why Not? did a number of things. Firstly, it revealed François Michelin’s “philosophy” to the general public. Secondly, it confrmed this same philosophy among the company employees. These reacted in three different ways to this book, which merely reiterated the contents of the annual speeches given at the medal award ceremonies. The frst group liked this compilation of their employer’s statements which confrmed his greatness:

François Michelin’s book is great. It’s… Me, I like it because it is true and plain. François Michelin, he is someone. You can only respect him. It’s respect for the man I knew because they allowed me to move up, they trusted me. (Mr. Copty, employee, aged 54)

The second group rediscovered a spirit imbued with anti-State and anti-trade union Christian morals. In their eyes, the compilation proved that their employer, whose statements of a social nature were seen as being far removed from reality, was outdated and in bad faith:

In the book, it’s always about advantage, for the customer in the frst place. Of course, it’s for the customer, but he doesn’t say much about the workers benefting. Him, he says it’s the customer. Fine. He’s got to buy. But the grey matter of all these people who will make the factory grow, they’re not really being honoured. It’s true. That’s right. It’s always the company spirit. And then that religion of his. Fine if he talked about it a little, but there’s a lot of it. (Mr. Pampi, retired worker, aged 80)

The third group refused to read the book, by the same token refusing to spend leisure time reading a management ideology they are already familiar with.

I haven’t read the book, no. I didn’t even feel like it. No, because I’ve been reading medal award speeches, stuff like that, for thirty years, I know 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 175

roughly his philosophy, I don’t need to… it’s fne. (Mr. Facost, supervisor, aged 49)

The employees who accepted to testify in the flm belong to two categories. Jocelyne Lemaire-Darnaud’s plan was simple: to give the Michelin workers a right of reply regarding their employer’s remarks published in And Why Not? Some forty Bibs spoke up in front of the camera. As hardly anyone without union protection accepted to testify, most of them were union members. Only nineteen testimonials were used, either because the image was poor or because some employees wanted to have their faces blurred. The struggle to fnd people willing to speak in front of a camera conveys the fear of reprisal and that it is impossible to testify against the boss in view of the support for the statements in his book. Despite these testimonials, the fact that a few dozen employees broke the code of silence should not obscure the fact that the vast majority endorse the Michelin spirit. In the flm, two technicians and seventeen workers—ffteen men and two women—speak out. Each of them has between eight and thirty-fve years of service with the company. In addition, two retired priest-workers, only one of whom worked at Michelin, as well as two wives of workers offered their thoughts on François Michelin’s book. This highlights the involvement of spouses in the life of the company. And Why Not? is also commented by three academics: the sociologists Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, as well as the economist Bernard Maris. Also joining in are the writer François Salvaing and two local politicians: Yves Leycuras, departmental secretary of the greens of the Puy-de-Dôme, and Bernard Jacqueson, former deputy mayor of Clermont-Ferrand. Paroles de Bibs concerns as much the Michelin spirit and the ways in which it is transmitted as the desacralisation of the company through:

– voicing the lack of recognition of the workers and their work; – feelings of injustice and the use of the legal system; – exposing the use of the notion of secrecy as a tool for exploiting the workers; – the break driven by the transformation of capitalism and its spirit; – undermining the mythical fgure of François Michelin; and – recounting debunking and desacralising counter-narratives. 176 C. VÉDRINE

Fig. 7.1 Poster of the flm Paroles de Bibs, November 2001 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 177

Each of the building blocks of the Michelin spirit, as described earlier, namely the father fgure, secrecy, asceticism, and moral and Christian thinking, is raised (Fig. 7.1). The ways in which the spirit is transmitted, such as education (in particular training the body), space, the gaze as well as the management discourses and the internal company documents outlining the Michelin values, are also addressed in turn. Many viewers remember how the Bibs in the flm felt injustice at work (also discussed are the court cases). Thus, the demands for recognition and consideration set the pace of the documentary: “Me, I’ve been at Michelin for thirty years. Maybe there are things they could criticise about me, but certainly not in my work. […] I say: we don’t refuse to work, on the contrary. What we want is consideration” (Josiane Chabridon, worker of thirty years). These remarks highlight that it is not about a recognition of work but a recognition of the person. “Justice results from the fact that work provides social gratifcation and a sense of fulflment. Conversely, feelings of injustice stem from […] a subjective sense of alienation: tiredness, weariness, a lack of interest for the job, feelings of contempt and powerlessness about one’s work” (Dubet, op. cit., 508*), feelings that are expressed in the documentary with contempt being singled out time and again. The impact of the “new spirit of capitalism” is often mentioned. Redundancy plans, funded by the State, frequent internal movements, de-skilling, the end of career development, a demotivated workforce who go to work “in reverse gear” awaiting retirement, and the state of disrepair of the “totally rotten” buildings suggesting that the workshops are going to close down are among the subjects broached by the actors. By expressing these various injustices, the workers have reclaimed the idea of sacrifce, the virtue of the employer:

These people, they have to realise one thing. They have hundreds of people who have given their life for them. And they have to remember that. It’s whole families, whole generations that worked for them, only for them. I’m talking in particular about my grandfather and my father. They worked for them and a lot of the time they weren’t home. When we said: ‘Where is dad?’, ‘He’s at the company.’ ‘And why aren’t we going to the snow this weekend?’, ‘Daddy doesn’t earn enough money’. (Serge Ferry)

In essence, part of the exploitation system has been exposed. The flm denounces the use of the fgure of the customer to justify business policy, 178 C. VÉDRINE and the demand for secrecy as a tool that helps preventing people from becoming aware of the exploitation system but also from challenging it. The flm contributes to desacralising the company in that it undermines the mythical fgure of François Michelin. From the accusation by Jean Lajonchère (former priest-worker) that he talks for the sake of talking, to Joseph Zuncheddu’s comment “He is the biggest whore”, via Gilbert Boyer’s challenge of François Michelin’s visionary aspect, and mocking the attempt to reduce the social distance to the employees, both by Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot and by René Tartry (worker of twenty years): François Michelin’s sacred status that exudes from his book has been rocked. One example illustrating this is the reaction to this excerpt from And Why Not?, written by Ivan Levaï and Yves Messarovitch: “What is to be made of the habit he has of telling us he does the dishes at home, that it allows him to think about the industrial world? Is this a kind of affectation with François Michelin? I do not think so”. While sociologists recontextualise these moments of domestic duties as “symbolic vanity”, they are surprised, as is René Tartry, that François Michelin does not have a dishwasher. René Tartry concludes with a question: “I don’t know. Maybe his hands are dirty… 36, la Cagoule, maybe some things have to be erased?” Relaying the counter-narratives also makes Paroles de Bibs a tool for desacralising Michelin. Four desacralisation stories are portrayed: Michelin as an accomplice of la Cagoulev, Bibendum’s centenary, “the Michelin case” and the 20-cent strike. These narratives are an act of resistance against manipulated memory by reinstating or revealing the truth. To go further, we could say that the workers testifying in front of the camera fght lest people forget, as it were, or against the excesses of selective memory (Ricœur 2006). The Cagoule episode is part of the abusive forgetting imposed by the company. The workers in Paroles de Bibs speak again to tell their story and to restore a number of truths which some will refuse to hear, preferring the appealing management versions. This is how the demystifying narratives used in the flm have to be approached, as their narration allows to reinstate each individual while subjecting François Michelin to a symbolic fall. Two narratives have been eroded. The frst concerns the Clermont- Paris cycling race as recounted by François Michelin in his book, during which the Michelin brothers scattered nails along the route. The workers’ reaction was unequivocal: “I think this kind of stuff is petty. I think it really shows the usual Michelin standards anyway”, Renée Sautarelle rails, 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 179 without mentioning any virtue that was meant to be remembered from this episode. The second narrative concerns François Michelin’s portrait. “It’s his factory so he chooses his offce, his living environment in the factory, his car, his old grey coat! I think that’s the outside aspect, which is a kind of myth, the François Michelin myth”, Jean-Pierre Serezat says with irritation. To conclude, “it is in times of crisis, when society is affected, when its plans are upset and it urgently needs reorganising, that the ideological aspects and the political stakes of myths stand out most”, as highlighted in the flm. However, the documentary also reveals a certain ambivalence about “father François”, as some of the workers in the flm still call him. The complexity of belonging to the Michelin company is also suggested in certain excerpts. To stay with the same company for over thirty years, surely it has to offer certain advantages… The ambiguity of the Bibs’ relationship with the company is implied by anyone willing to hear it. Jean-Louis Bayle, worker for the last twenty-two years, recounts a mythical episode: “When people talked about François… For my father, François, that was the 2CV, the old raincoat …”. The most unsettling thing is probably the reminder that the credit must go to the boss, as expressed in particular by Serge Ferry: “You have to give them credit somehow, they have their own worries”. The debt contracted with the employer and the respect that is his due percolate through the documentary, which showcases the love of work. Again, the question of recognition goes hand in hand with the justice? principles of equality and merit. What some of the workers ask for is not to change position or occupation, but to be fairly rewarded and to have a work pace that is compatible with family life. Finally, the reasons why the employees remain loyal to the company are featured together with the shift from “wanting to believe” its myth towards disenchantment: “All is well in the beginning. You’re in a… he tells us about being in a house, being in a family, about working all together, and it’s true, he makes us dream. You want to believe it, that’s the worst. It’s because you want to believe it, you want to fght for it. And you do fght for it, and then you realise that anyway in the end you’ve got nothing to gain. You give all your strength, all your life, all our ideas and in return, you get nothing. You work for him, for a frm, for bosses, but you don’t feel like it, we’re not… we’re not human beings. You feel like you’re, I’d say in servitude, again as a caricature, that you’re not human, that you’re a 180 C. VÉDRINE robot” (Gilbert Boyer). Disenchantment takes the shape of betrayal with Laurent Vendange: “The whole world thought that he was good. There. People thought that he was good because he provided for Clermont”. Let us now turn to the impact the documentary had on the various actors. In a nutshell, the management dismissed the contents of the flm, censored with different means of pressure its broadcasting and screening by an important number of staff, and retaliated with the same tool, namely the audiovisual media. Locally, only the cinema, run in those days by the Michelin Works Council, was prepared to screen it. Was it self-censorship or the result of a threat from the Michelin management? We have no way of answering this question. A similar question arises with regard to the conspicuous absence of the local press and television at the flm’s premiere, whereas the national media were in attendance. The company has furthermore indicated, in an internal memo addressed to the executives, that it disapproved of viewing the flm, implying that employees who did would be penalised by having their points-account frozen. Therefore, each viewing was attended by a member of the communications department to check who attended it.2 This deterrence campaign was supported by a discourse entirely along the lines of the company spirit, as in the management’s view Paroles de Bibs confrmed that the trade unions are irresponsible and manipulate the workers. This discourse overlooked the testimonies from non-unionised workers, which explains why a number of staff dismissed the flm. Under management pressure, the latter indicated that they were not interested in the discourse of a handful of troublemakers… A few days before Paroles de Bibs was released, François Michelin was awarded a medal for working ffty years. The general shareholder meeting, during which his son Édouard and 160 employees from 20 different countries paid respect to him, took place a few months later, on 17 May 2002. “We are here to celebrate what my father has built with passion for ffty years”, Édouard Michelin declared before showing a flm in which various captains of industry praised François Michelin’s greatness and simplicity. Glen Barton from Caterpillar, Carlos Ghosn from Nissan, Louis Schweitzer from Renault, Ferdinand Piëch from Volkswagen and “infuential men” such as Jean-Claude Trichet, governor of the Banque

2 Many people saw the flm in a cinema outside Clermont-Ferrand, or on video or DVD. 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 181 de France, and Liu Ji, advisor to the president of China, took it in turns to draw up a portrait of this modest boss. From his offce to his car: the attributes of the mythical fgure were described by the major capitalists of the world. An inscription at the back of the podium read: “Become What You Are”, one of François Michelin’s favourite phrases which he frequently used in the course of company rituals (and which was displayed the day of his funeral in April 2015). This ceremony was flmed and distributed to all the shareholders, with the title A Tribute to François Michelin: “From the Bottom of Our Hearts” [Hommage à François Michelin: “Du fond du cœur”]. It was then screened in each of the company’s workshops. In the days following the release of Paroles de Bibs, footage of the medal award ceremony was also screened under the same conditions. Never before had the ritual been flmed. 50 Years of Passion [50 ans de passion] showed a thousand medallists giving their deeply respected boss a standing ovation as he received his medal too. In order to reach this time the entire population of Clermont- Ferrand, an “institutional flm”, as the management described it, was screened between 1 and 7 October 2003 before the main flm in most cinemas in town, including the Ciné Dôme. An information memo on the intranet announced the flm as follows: it “outlines in 15 minutes the company’s major values. The flm takes place in the most remote parts and places on the planet: Chile, Germany, United States, China, Canada, Australia. Following the workers who extract the natural resources from the soil, often under extreme conditions (Amazon, the Andes Mountains, underground, in severe cold), one realises the crucial role played by the tyres of the machines that are designed to help them push always further”. The Michelin employees were given for the occasion two reduced-rate cinema tickets upon presentation of their professional card. Further Will Never Be Far Enough [Plus loin ne sera jamais trop loin] revealed a surprising aesthetic style and an extravagant outlay of means, a far cry from the typical discretion of the Michelin spirit on the one hand, and from the state of the Clermont-Ferrand buildings on the other. A far cry, in short, from the accusations made against the company in Paroles de Bibs. From the outset, the flm is announced as the work of well-known names. Produced by Éric Valli, “the producer of the flm Himalaya”, its soundtrack was written by Armand Amar, “the composer of Costa Gavras flms”. On the back of the brochure that was handed out at cinemas, the viewers could read: “Our mission is to make 182 C. VÉDRINE tyres into the key element in the progress of mobility. Deep down in the mines, in extreme conditions, Michelin women and men express every day their passion for progress”. The flm showcased the concepts and values of challenge, greatness (“the biggest tyres in the world”), respect and passion. It also highlighted how proud people are to belong to this great company. We are dealing here with another example of the management recy- cling criticism; the weapon used, in this case the audiovisual media, is turned on those who took it up in the frst place. For the Michelin employees, the impact of the response to the flm has been twofold: either it allowed them to speak out, fostering resistance against the company, or it fuelled the anti-trade union management discourse, encouraging resistance against resistance speech. At the end of each screening in one of the regional cinemas, Bibs who had come to see the flm, either still working or retired, shared their own experiences at the company. Some fed the cinema in haste, rejecting the views of the documentary. Others stayed to discuss with the actors- workers in attendance and to speak out after a long, enforced silence. Employee spouses who had come along to the cinema were staggered to discover the world in which their husband or wife had lived for years without ever talking about it, as always making Michelin out as a “good” frm. The screenings often ended with testimonies that remained anonymous for fear of reprisals. An executive effectively broke down, disclosing his distress and that of his colleagues: “What you’re saying here, the executives could say the same thing. But we don’t have anyone to defend us. What I experienced as harassment, I don’t wish it on anyone. What you have done with this flm is wonderful. People need to know what happens inside the factories”. There have been many reactions in the same vein, commending those who had the courage to bear witness in front of a camera. At each screening, the viewers were concerned about the reprisals facing the Bibs in the flm. None of them incurred any reprisals as such actions could be easily denounced. On the contrary, today the workers in Paroles de Bibs are protected in a way by the flm. Others, however, were “disgusted” by what they heard in the flm, to quote Mr. Mati (retired executive, aged 62) below, or refused to see it.

I saw it. I came out disgusted. Well, it’s my view that maybe makes me see things differently. I found it too simple. They just used some spiteful union members who don’t tell the truth. Me, I remember, I was upset, especially 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 183

in my profession, everything they said, and then getting ironical about a sentence from a book, it’s sick, it’s disgusting, it’s not normal. I don’t like that.

As the director explained in Le Nouvel Observateur on 21 November 2001, “when a manufacturer defends his interests in a book, it’s about the economy. When the employees reply, it’s activism”. A number of employees have accused the documentary of being “activist”, a term which takes on an insulting meaning here. In the same vein, the Bibs in the flm are branded as dishonest. They are criticised for spreading untruths, for being unworthy of the love and recognition offered by the Firm in general, and by “father” Michelin in particular. Rejecting the flm, both by those who saw it as by those who did not want to see it, expresses the refusal to see and hear what goes on in the company. “But this dispossession”, Ricœur tells us, “is not without a secret complicity, which makes forgetting a semi-passive, semi-active behavior, as is seen in forgetting by avoidance (fuite), the expression of bad faith and its strategy of evasion motivated by an obscure will not to inform oneself, not to investigate the harm done by the citizen’s environment, in short by a wanting-not-to-know” (Ricœur 2006, 448–449). This raises the double responsibility of keeping silent and not wanting to know, to avoid the responsibility resting on those who know. This problem is raised by one of the actors in the flm who told me after a screening in June 2003:

The problem is that, as soon as you start becoming aware of things, you have to react. That’s what’s diffcult. (Silence). That’s why people don’t want to see what’s going on.

As concerns local and national viewers, their reaction was unanimous, mirroring that of the press. Most articles go again over the publication of the book by “the most secretive CEO in France”, a year before “the Michelin case”. In it, François Michelin covers his faith in God and economic liberalism, as well as his anti-trade union and anti-marxist views. The birth of the director’s project about the workers’ response “to the divine right boss” (Libération, 26 November 2001) is then outlined, together with all the diffculties she faced in terms of funding, production, shooting and distribution (the television channels having refused to broadcast it). Her work is compared almost as a matter of course with that of Michael Moore. Jocelyne Lemaire-Darnaud explains to the press 184 C. VÉDRINE her desire to fght against portrayals relating to the disappearance of workers, which resonated both with the viewers and some of the critics. While Télérama (28 November 2001) wonders about the “cultivated obliviousness of this reality”, Le Monde (1 December 2001) draws the attention to the “existence of social classes and the resulting merci- less struggle”. For its part, Libération devotes its back page to Laurent Vendange, a young non-unionised worker. The article insists on the likely upcoming closure of his workshop and raises the question of the “precariousness generation” of fxed-term contracts. Lastly, the flm also led to examining, or re-examining, the labour question which many viewers discovered or rediscovered. Many qualifers have been used in the press to describe Paroles de Bibs: often referred to as a “beautiful” flm, it has also been called moving, scathing, incisive, refreshing, caustic, mind-blowing, etc. This “anti- establishment” and “combat flm” enhances the “power of flm as a force for outrage and a means of intervention”, according to Le Monde (13 November 2001). The Nouvel Observateur presents it as “the flm that irritates Michelin” (28 November 2001), who refuses to issue any statement to the press about this “partisan” documentary, instead merely stating, in a memo from the communications department, that Paroles de Bibs does not refect either what is happening nor what the employees really experience. Few critics echo the statements of the Michelin management. Only Ivan Levaï, in an interview with Télérama, declares that the workers in the flm are not credible, their boss being “the last of the Mohicans” in terms of humanism and responsibility (op. cit.). In Le Monde dated 1 December 2001, Stéphane Lauer criticises the documentary for also being “simplistic and naïve”, while the same newspaper published other complimentary reviews. Only the local newspaper La Montagne published an unusual article dated 30 November 2001 by Jean-Pierre Rouger, which read: “By some coincidental timing the flm-documentary Paroles de Bibs was released less than a week after François Michelin was awarded, at his son Édouard’s initiative, the gold medal of the Firm, with one thousand medallists in attendance who, from worker to executive, gave him a standing ovation”. This article speaks volumes about the links between certain Clermont-Ferrand journalists and the Michelin communications department. There was no reference to the risks entailed in breaking the silence, which was extensively covered by the national press. As though La Montagne itself were reduced to silence, 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 185 a silence that has been worrying the people of Clermont-Ferrand for a long time. Finally, there are two points concerning the impact of the flm on the press that are worth noting. In the frst place the dissemination by the media of the desacralisation and demystifcation narratives found in the flm. In the second place, the foor was given again to the workers who multiplied interviews, seizing this access to a reserved public space to (a) tell of their “fed-upness” that made them betray the demand for silence; (b) verbalise again their oppression and misery at work; and (c) provide the flm with comments and thoughts on the Michelin company in particular, and on capitalism in general. With the media coverage of the flm release and the glowing reviews it received, the workers have not only enjoyed support but recognition for their words in particular. In a nutshell, they regained dignity. For this reason, the workers have taken ownership of the flm and sought to promote it, multiplying the public intervention arenas. The documentary has effectively become a combat tool for the workers who seized it like a new resistance instrument against their employer’s word, by setting up the Organisation for Support and Discussion about the Film Paroles de Bibs [Association de soutien et débats autour du flm Paroles de Bibs]. It aims to help with and organise the screening of Jocelyne Lemaire-Darnaud’s work, as well as other flms of a social nature by promoting, according to the articles of association, “anything that generates a discussion about working conditions”. The members of the organisation come from various backgrounds—working class, cinema enthusiasts, intellectuals, academics, non-governmental organisations, political and trade union organisations—where they have disseminated the flm that they have made their own. In the correspondence of the organisation, chaired by Jean-Pierre Serezat, there are indeed many references to “our flm”, which has been promoted since 2001 throughout France. Since its release, Paroles de Bibs has become a resistance tool because it helps to set speech free and appear in hitherto inaccessible public arenas, but also because screening it in different environments allows the Bibs to infltrate the widest possible resistance networks. Screening- discussions are frequently held by universities, graduate schools and the alternative scene which has made it an audiovisual tool for trade unions, political parties and left-wing movements (such as the Parti Communiste Français, the Jeunes communistes movement, the Fédération anarchiste, 186 C. VÉDRINE the Association pour la Taxation des Transactions fnancières et l’Action Citoyenne, etc.) to denounce working conditions. * To conclude, the main points to remember about the contents and the impact of Paroles de Bibs are:

– The appearance of François Michelin in the public arena led to that of his employees. This is the frst impact of the publicised words of a man who has fuelled secrecy. – Being visible and listened to in the public arena has helped them recover the recognition they repeatedly demanded in the flm. The eye of the camera in frst instance, followed by the eye of the viewers, made it possible to respond to the workers’ demands, which could be rendered as “Look at us!” and “Listen to us!”, or even: “Give us the attention our boss refuses to give us, look who we are, hear our working conditions and the contempt we are subjected to in this well-known company. The boss has looked away but do keep looking at us”. – The flm has allowed the workers to appear frst in public cinemas and then in public spaces hitherto reserved to the bosses and intellectuals, such as the national press and universities. – Public space is to be understood here as a space for exchange, discussion and meetings. The flm has allowed the Bibs to appear on the so-called activist scene by revealing a number of injustices, echoing the four sources of indignation inspired in the critics by capitalism, as set out by Boltanski and Chiapello (op. cit.). The words of the actors-workers thus spread both in the domestic space and in Clermont-Ferrand’s urban spaces: the flm, which is still in circulation as a DVD, is debated in the home, at work, etc. – Paroles de Bibs has been reclaimed as a combat and resistance tool and is re-enshrined among the main trade unions objectives aimed at worker empowerment. The flm has turned into an educational device for union training and many Works Councils have purchased a copy. – The flm contributes to the desacralisation of the company by transgressing the code of silence, by undermining François Michelin and by spreading counter-narratives. Far from being unanimously accepted, it has caused quite a stir in Clermont-Ferrand. Many Bibs 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 187

have dismissed the flm, outraged to see a “bunch of union members” attacking their employer and refusing to see the man who still is a mythical fgure being undermined. Fuelling the anti-trade union and anti-intellectual discourse, they are the ones resisting desacralisation, tangled up in not-wanting-to-know that shields them from any reaction that awareness would imply. Likewise, not all the workers from the flm attend the screenings-discussions. Only half of them support taking ownership of it as a tool for struggle, which cannot be reduced to union resistance since it also involves non-unionised workers. On the contrary, it would seem that this flm has helped fnding an alternative to a unionism that is running out of steam. – Paroles de Bibs allows to conceive of the differentiation mentioned above between Michelin and non-Michelin, beyond union membership. One of the non-unionised workers-actors said to me about the absent ones: “Those who are never there at the screenings, it’s because they are Michelin, regardless of what they say”. Among the Bib viewers, the real Michelin, who dismissed the flm, loyal to the father’s word, could be distinguished from the fake Michelin who loved it, unworthy of the father’s recognition. An additional categorisation of the actors in the flm can be made. Among these actors, the fake Michelin are those who spread the flmed word. They accuse those who struggle to accept what they say and stay away from public debate, of being real Michelin. – The ambivalence it raises can nevertheless also be found in the fake Michelin, entangled in a system from which they have a hard time freeing themselves. This is refected in the name of the organisation supporting the flm. These remarks compel us to take into account the secondary functions of the fght. Fighting against something or somebody allows to maintain a goal and a meaning to one’s actions. This is the issue for most activists: to be against something often means being stuck to it… If Michelin were to respond to all the employees’ demands, many of those who built their life and gave it meaning through fghting would fnd themselves helpless. This is not about ignoring skipping over the management’s sincerity or their defeats, or the expressed outrage, far from it, but about observing the extent to which many activists are shaped by resistance, precisely because it gives meaning to their actions and provides them with a role and a usefulness of a law-keeping and social nature. 188 C. VÉDRINE

7.2 A Feeling of Ambivalence: The Difficulty of Empowerment In essence, the employees and the local population feel ambivalent towards the company, the Bibs and the residents wishing to become independent of “Michelin” yet with the company still playing its role of guaranteeing and being responsible for all the good and the bad things.

7.2.1 The Employees’ Ambiguous Feelings: From Love to Hate and from Fascination to Repulsion The employees’ feelings of ambivalence towards “Michelin” have been mentioned throughout this work. They manifest in two ways. Firstly, through the feelings for the “father” in particular and for “Michelin” in general, a fgure at times benevolent and at other times contemptuous. Secondly, through those who are attached to the company for contributing to national glory, either prestigious or exploiting. I have already highlighted the ambiguity of the relations within the paternalistic system between the employees and their employer (Debouzy 1988), and shown how they were symbolically likened to the relations between a father and his children. Freud’s work on the ambivalent affection of sons for their fathers, and Enriquez’s on power will help us understand better the paradoxes in which the Bibs are mired, with the feelings that bind them to “father François”. Since the symbolic death of the castrating father is needed to achieve an autonomous life (Enriquez 1997), the temptation to kill him is as strong as the admiration for him. Parole de Bibs illustrates this “ambivalent emotional attitude” (Freud 2001, 71) of the workers towards their employer: after symbolically killing François Michelin, some regretted it and deserted the screenings- discussions during which the killing of the father was completed. We have also seen how certain statements were sometimes imbued with ambiguity. While many employees curse their employer for barring them from pleasure, at the same time they have a great admiration and respect for him, sometimes barely concealed. One could say that the history of the Michelin workers is the history of a rising desire to symbolically kill the father, which increases as the impossibility to act it out grows. Resisting to accomplish it echoes the diffculty of empowerment. As pointed out by Enriquez, freedom and autonomy can only exist “when power has been desacralised. But 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 189 power will not be desacralised if people censor their own desires and needs because they are scared of freedom, scared of confrontation” (op. cit., 27*). Few employees were prepared to share their experiences and many have either dismissed the contents of the flm or refused to hear it, precisely because they would have to deal with the symbolic fall of the “father” and desacralisation afterwards. The employees’ feelings for their employer oscillate between love and hate for some, and hate and love for others. Young executives, for example, frequently have no feelings either way. The frst group, devoted to “father François”, make no secret of feeling abandoned, while the second group, flled with resentment towards the “old man”, make no secret of recognising the credit he deserves and remind us that “You have to give him his due”. As the wife of a staunch trade unionist, really against Michelin, confded to me: “He loves him, his ‘Michelin’, but he doesn’t know it!” The feelings for the employer therefore consist of a complex web of love, hate, abandonment and resentment. Michelin is also given credit on account of his contribution to the wealth of the country, both in economic and symbolic terms. It gives rise to a feeling of ambivalence that is only slightly different from the feeling I have just discussed. Here, it concerns the company itself and the ambiguity can be seen in the alternating feelings of repulsion and fascination for the Firm. According to Dubet’s principles of justice, the merit principle hinges in particular on the contribution to the creation of shared wealth. Individualism, which is at the root of a number of injustices, can only be tolerated if it contributes to the common good. We saw earlier that the head of the Michelin company is sometimes accused of being self- ish, in “the Michelin case” for example, and sometimes praised for his contribution to the economic and symbolic national wealth. On the whole, the employees are proud to belong to this internationally well- known frm. Generally speaking, the Bibs are very interested in how the sporting events involving Michelin, which they often follow with passion, play out. The fascination with technology, performance, creation and inventiveness prevails in that case over repulsion and spurning a company with internal exploitation and subjection policies. Michelin’s presence at sporting events, the global success of its mascot and the quality of the tyres boost the employees’ pride. The company has often been compared to Dunlop, the mythical enemy acquired by the Japanese frm Sumitomo, to point out that Michelin managed to avoid irreparable 190 C. VÉDRINE harm by implementing the right strategies at the right time. This comparison with the British rubber manufacturer allows moreover to justify the company’s most painful episodes. Hence the ambiguity of the employees’ sentiments, despite their resentment: “You have to understand. It’s not easy for him either to take decisions like that”. Here, the ambivalence of feelings can be seen in the oscillation between trust and distrust towards the company. Trust is put into anything bearing the name Michelin, a source of pride for the employees. The distrust many of them feel is rooted in the company’s internal policies and functioning, in a nutshell, in the system that exploits labour. Distrust feeds desacralisation since it is the source of breaking the belief in the Michelin myth. The loss of social advantages, of faith in the future and in the word of the “father” who has not kept his promise to keep 18,000 employees in Clermont-Ferrand, have powered a process of disbelief associated with the feelings of deception and scorn referred to earlier.

7.2.2 The Demand to Keep a Promise to the Clermont-Ferrand Population. The 2001 Publication of Dimanche Du Piéton: Go and See If Michelin Is Still There In June 2001, a media event brought out the ambivalent relations between the people of Clermont-Ferrand and the company. The very people who welcomed Paroles de Bib and congratulated the workers for their courage were wandering about the internal streets of the company factories a few months before the flm was released. As part of a special edition of Dimanche du piéton [Sunday on Foot], Michelin actually opened the doors of the company to the locals. Held every month since 1996 by La Montagne, this promotional event by the local daily newspaper is a hike. The idea, in the words of one of the organisers, is “to go for a walk in an interesting heritage place”. According to one of the organisers at La Montagne, plans for an edition inside the Michelin premises had been on the cards for a long time:

It’s an old dream of the newspaper management to make a Dimanche du piéton at Michelin. [….] And it’s true that Michelin in Clermont… there is this emotional thing between the locals and Michelin, so I imagine that they were very happy to fnally be able to go inside the factory.

This “old dream” became true with Édouard Michelin’s consent, who saw in this event an opportunity to get media coverage for the company’s 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 191 new policy of openness by countering its outdated and negative image that had been projected by the media and reinforced in 1999 by “the Michelin case”. The new director agreed to open the company doors in order to show the locals, the press, the shareholders and the potential young applicants for executive positions, evidence that the company had changed by showcasing the freshly renovated new headquarters. The effort of opening the doors of a company with a reputation for secrecy and the refurbishment of its premises were meant to be proof of its open-mindedness and that its spirit had been rehabilitated. This media event was part of an image policy, as much for the company as for the city of Clermont-Ferrand, partner of the Dimanche du piéton event.

7.2.2.1 A Media Event to Convey an Image of Openness Three tours were on offer, mapped out by Les amis de Chamina (a ram- bling association) and the company’s communications department. All three started and fnished at the Marcel Michelin stadium. The frst route was four kilometres long. It went through the Cataroux factory, the Chanteranne workers’ housing estates, and passed by the old Michelin school in the neighbourhood, the site of Les Carmes, and a municipal exhibition and conference structure that had recently opened under the Polydôme. The second route, which was eight kilometres long, extended the frst one by going through Montferrand. The longest route was twelve kilometres and went through the ASM hall, the factory of La Combaude and the La Plaine estate. For the occasion, a photo exhibition, “La Plaine Today and Yesterday”, which the ramblers could see when walking through the largest district created by Michelin, had been organised by the Viviani retirement club. Starting at the stadium Marcel Michelin allowed to show that it had been recently reconstructed, largely with company funds. The manufacturer was also keen for one of the routes to go through the ASM sports facilities and for all three itineraries to exhibit the new head offce development. Les Amis de Chamina on the other hand had to advance many arguments before Michelin agreed to allow the routes through the workers’ housing estates and the old school. For its part, the city insisted on including in the routes the Montferrand district and the workers’ housing estates of La Plaine, which was in the process of being renovated by the OPAC (a social landlord), as well as the Polydôme, built on the site of a former Michelin cooperative. In the hall of this congress centre, information panels displayed the city’s urban planning projects. 192 C. VÉDRINE

The company’s policy of openness was a main focus of the local and national media, written press, radio and television. The event was indeed widely covered by the media since their interest had been fanned by the opportunity to enter “the most secret factories” in France, to quote press comments. While the press had fuelled the Michelin myth until then, this Dimanche du piéton was an opportunity to announce a desacralising event. La Montagne warned, in its issue dated 10 June, that “a myth is about to collapse. The reputation for secrecy surrounding the Michelin factories will cease on 24 June: on that day, the manufacturer will open the doors of three of its Clermont-Ferrand factories”. Further down it asked: “What will the ramblers actually discover? That Michelin and Clermont-Ferrand no longer deserve the image they are still stuck with”. On 22 June, it added: “It is a unique, almost historic, opportunity for anyone who is curious. An exclusive date since the public will be allowed to wander around the sites which the great and the good could not access […] This hike promises to be an altogether exceptional event: the ramblers […] will see the factory doors open for them […] How many visitors will there be on Sunday? Nobody ventures to suggest exact numbers, but everybody agrees that it will be crowded. And for a good reason: to see the secrecy myth fall is undeniably quite an event in the life of Clermont-Ferrand” (La Montagne, 22 June 2001). The mythical episode about General de Gaulle being unable to enter the factories was recounted by the media. Narrating it allowed the promise, together with the opening of the doors, of attending an event bearing witness to a new era following the end of the myth. Of course, La Montagne had a feld day especially as it had initiated this announced scoop. Other newspapers followed suit, on the one hand because it was the wish of the Michelin company and the city of Clermont-Ferrand, on the other hand because promising this event gave them an exciting piece of news for the readers, listeners and viewers. “Renowned for its secrecy, the Michelin factory will open its doors to visitors for the frst time on Sunday 24 June. Quite an event!” according to Le Figaro on 22 June 2001. As pointed out by Fassin and Bensa, “to its contemporaries, the event always marks the beginning of a new era” (2002, 11*), involving the birth or building of a new temporal axis that allows to think the before and after of that event, in this case the collapse of the myth. The Dimanche du piéton therefore promised a renewal. Regarding the itinerary, what was hinted at or barely suggested (“it has to be said clearly”, La Montagne ventured tentatively) is that it would 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 193 be a matter of only walking through the internal streets of the factory as the workshops could not be visited. “Of course”, was the comment from a journalist from LeMonde, “Dream on!” Le Figaro remarked ironically.

7.2.2.2 The Route Through the Michelin Sites: Move Along… There Is Nothing to See Here 15,000 people, mainly locals, walked along the itinerary of this Dimanche du piéton. 95% of the population in attendance were from the Puy-de-Dôme. The Bibs were not in the majority. Some came with their spouses and their children to show them their place of work, but the hall at Les Carmes had already been opened not long before to the employees and their relatives, as part of an event refecting the company’s internal policy of openness. The day of this Dimanche du piéton, the reason for employee attendance was always their spouses’ or children’s curiosity, who could not wait to enter this mythical and secret place where their parent works without ever talking about their work. Some were retired staff, curious to see the walls crumble or nostalgic for their place of work, which they would proudly show to their family. However, the majority of Bibs refused to spend their Sunday at the factory, what is more with their family. Many were also suspicious when the event was announced:

I don’t think I’ve said many bad things about the Firm, but inside there are things that don’t sit well with me. Like these kind of fairs, where you get grandpa, grandma and all that, and come on, let’s go, because it’s Michelin, so that’s it! It’s as if John-Paul II opened the Vatican so that we could go in and that’s it… and that, it gets on my nerves. I can’t stand that. (Mr. Mati, retired executive, aged 62)

I went to this Dimanche du piéton with a voice recorder. I was accompanied by two ladies from Clermont-Ferrand, Mrs. Cadrine and Mrs. Marchat, both in their forties. They commented on the third itinerary along which a number of ramblers agreed to share their impressions. The people I interviewed during and after the Dimanche du piéton seemed to have come for a single reason, although justifed differently: the wish to see. It was a matter of assessing Michelin’s spatial hold on Clermont-Ferrand, of seeing the newly refurbished head offce (“to see from the inside how it has been refurbished”, to quote one rambler), or to satisfy an ill-defned curiosity. “Just like that”, “to see”, see “what was 194 C. VÉDRINE going on”, what is going on, because obviously something is happening behind the doors that hide a secret: “I thought I might discover something from the inside” (Mrs. Randon, Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 64): she came for the opportunity to discover the secret, to bare it. It is about seeing what lurks behind the doors, what has always been removed from sight, seeing the insides of the myth, understanding what it is made of “from the inside”. It was with enthusiasm, albeit somewhat contained out of respect for sacred places, that the ramblers crossed the threshold of the Cataroux factory, starting a long walk, unthinkable for a long a time as it was forbidden, which soon left them bewildered. The only thing to be seen were buildings in an advanced state of dilapidation and disrepair, to which access was denied. Here and there, along the itinerary lorries equipped with Michelin tyres could be seen, as well as some tyres with brief explanatory notices, yet there was no one available to give any information. Very soon a strange feeling took over, of witnessing the staging… of nothing. From site to site, from workers’ housing estate to workers’ housing estate, the horizon of the satisfaction of “seeing” vanished and gave way to genuine disappointment. Even crossing the mythical tracks at Cataroux, where a short flm about their operation was shown when entering, did not seem to entirely please the visitors. For a very good reason, as the place was empty. The last glimmer of hope to satisfy one’s curiosity was to cross the threshold of the Michelin parent site: Les Carmes, symbol of the company’s history. “It’s going to be a very emotional moment”, one visitor said hopefully, hardly hiding her fear of another disappointment. The sites could be walked through but not a single building was open to view. Only the outside of refurbished spaces and the new Michelin reception area, displaying the stages of refurbishment, could be seen…

There is a Bibendum drawn on the foor. In the end I was surprised that Michelin did such a thing as it’s not really their style, but well, on the other hand it is a showcase. I was surprised because it almost goes from one extreme to another. (Mr. Chirop, Clermont-Ferrand resident, aged 32)

The itinerary ended with the “showcase” before returning to the stadium Marcel Michelin. What was on display was what this media event was meant to show, namely a change in company communication. It is in 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 195 fact this demonstrative approach that took the visitors aback in the frst instance, as they were not used to this type of method from the ascetic manufacturer. However, it should be noted that only Bibendum’s greatness may seem ostentatious to the locals, since the refurbished buildings remain stark to say the least. When the participants take stock of the day, two points stand out. In the frst place, the opportunity they have been given to admire the refurbished head offce of the very secretive company. Even though it could only be seen from the outside, except for the forum. In the second place, the feeling, after twelve kilometres, of ultimately not having seen anything. Mr. Chirop’s words below express at the same time disappointment at not having seen, but also satisfaction, which one has to be seen to show, at the better than nothing that has been offered.

I did think that they let us go where they were happy for us to go. I didn’t see much, because visiting a factory where nobody works… Me, I remember when I was small, I liked to visit places where they make things and stuff, but while people were working because you could see things. Whereas here… Well, it’s better than nothing.

7.2.2.3 Yet They Saw Something: The Michelin Spirit Listening to the participants, something has actually been seen and heard: the Michelin spirit. Moving through the sites was an opportunity to verbalise their fascination for the Michelin family. The transmission of the name, the succession, the family saga and dynasty have generated many comments, anecdotes and memories, as can be seen from this excerpt of a conversation between two participants who accompanied me on the itinerary:

– If you think that it kept going for generations and generations despite the ordeals… Again, it should be said, they haven’t been spared. – No, they haven’t. They’ve been bombarded during the war, and with everything that happens in a family. Deaths, disappointments… – Exactly. But despite all that…

The fascination for the company’s success, the inventiveness and innovation it has shown, was also expressed. It should be noted that the fascination is almost expressed with embarrassment since it reveals an ambiguity: 196 C. VÉDRINE

But it works, and it has to work because he is well placed on the world market. But it’s what has always annoyed me a bit, because at the same time it’s unbearable to think how the workers are made to work in that universe but there’s also the advantage it can give on the outside. (Mrs. Cadrine)

Many spoke along these lines, admitting to being “in two minds”, as they are regarding the company’s paternalistic system:

Like it or not, but there was this development thing he created, from cot to coffn, from maternity to the graveyard. And earlier, I was talking to these elderly people and they were saying: when the housing estates were built, it was really… people came from the Ballainvilliers district, crum- bling, infested with rats and other things, and then they came to these lovely, comfortable houses… […] At the same time, it seems inhuman, but at the same time it gave security. It was… huge. (Mrs. Marchat)

In essence, in the course of that day people expressed the ambiguity of the relations between Michelin and the local population, which are part of a complex memory, both individual and social. The notions of secrecy and asceticism underpinning the Michelin spirit could also be seen on many occasions, in the architecture and in the “No Entry” injunctions all along the itinerary. They could also be heard, in the ironic comments and the anecdotes told. In front of the big greenhouse at the entrance of Les Carmes, I heard this conversation between Mrs. Cadrine and Mrs. Marchat, which seemed somewhat cynical as it took place at the end of the itinerary and with no hope whatso- ever to see anything at all:

– I saw the notice saying rubber tree but I didn’t see the tree. – But they’ve done that on purpose! They maintain secrecy. Surely, you wouldn’t want to see the tree that allows the Michelin tyres to be made!! – We’ve seen photographs of it, that’s it, isn’t it, basically? – Ah, if it’s that big … but as I said, there’s nothing to see. Actually, who says that they make tyres? It could be a cover. Who knows, they may be drug dealers! Because there’s nothing to prove that we were actually in a tyre factory. Not even the tree!!

It was not possible to visit the greenhouse. This was not only the ulti- mate let-down of expectations but it also confrmed the ever signifcant 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 197 presence of secrecy, leading Mrs. Marchat to share a deeply meaningful memory:

I remember when I was 15, we had to do a presentation. We could choose any subject. Me, I chose Michelin. So I wrote a letter to get some documents: could you give me your secret? (laughter). My classmates said: ‘Do you think he’ll give it to you?’ The response I got was: ‘No, Madam, we can’t give you the secret but we’re sending you lots of information’. (laughter)3

As to the ways in which the Michelin spirit is transmitted, the walkers mentioned spatial discipline and the gaze of others. What could be seen and was perceived by the ramblers remains the contrast between the exhibition exercise throughout the forum at Les Carmes and the rest of the itinerary along “decayed”, “outdated”, “prison-like” and “military” buildings:

There’s something almost military about the company. I thought it was austere […] It’s a bit murky, it’s… everything is blocked off. And you really can feel the factory, even though it was a track they were making there, you can still feel the fxed, compartmentalised spaces, you even imagine that at the end of the day, the guy in there, is in there, not somewhere else. There’s almost something like a prison about it. (Mr. Chriop)

In addition, Michelin’s spatial hold on Clermont-Ferrand was assessed. These objectively ascertainable and measurable data have sat- isfed some very special visitors. It concerns those who came equipped with a professional outlook: geographers, architects and urban planners. Although in a minority, to them a wall had collapsed. The satisfaction of crossing a geographical boundary contrasts with the disappointment felt by most participants who came to cross a symbolic boundary. The idea of crossing suggested by the threshold, a meeting between private and external (Salignon 1996), has been expressed as the feeling of coming in “at Michelin’s”:

3 It should be noted that there are no Bibs in this lady’s family and that she put her choice of subject down to her fascination for the company, because of its family aspect. 198 C. VÉDRINE

When I came in at the tracks, it felt like coming into someone’s home, because we know it’s a family factory. So I said to myself: I’m coming a bit into someone’s home, really. They have allowed us to come and visit. (Mrs. Marchat)

The feeling of coming into someone’s home can be explained by the family dimension of the company and the green light for people to cross the threshold once they have been invited in. It calls on a set of agreed practices, manners and adjustments when being welcomed. Similarly, it suggests a restraint and a contained dissatisfaction (“It’s great that they let us in in the frst place”) about the limited use of a private space that has temporarily been made public. Thus, the limits inherent in the permission to enter a territory justify setting boundaries around the space and closing doors, behind which supposedly are the places where “It’s happening”. Regarding the gaze of others, it is clearly important as seeing is a para- mount issue. It should be pointed out that some of the walkers doubted that there would possibly be cameras, symbols of the panoptic surveillance gaze: the ubiquitous gaze clashing with the wish to see.

7.2.2.4 Go and See… If Michelin Is There Embarrassed by the a priori absence of discourse, many were speechless in front of remains of building that could not be read for lack of a reading clue. Seeing the places prompted comments projecting and assuming what the working conditions could be like. With no information or explanations provided, everyone created their own interpretation from their perspective and tinted by their own concerns. The “You wonder”, “It must be”, “You imagine” punctuated the list of assumptions sustaining the Michelin myth:

It’s very impressive, it’s so… inhuman. Inhuman, yes. You can’t see anything that says well-being, human warmth. You wonder what state the people who work are in and in what state they can get out of it, it’s impressive. I say prison environment because they don’t see daylight at all, or hardly, with very small windows, and if they’re locked up there for eight hours on the trot, it must have an impact I think. (Mrs. Cadrine)

We should elaborate on the repeatedly expressed disappointment of not having seen or of not being able to say I saw (“I would have liked 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 199 to see”, “I thought we were going to see a slideshow”, “We didn’t see any tyres”, “It was bluff, we didn’t see anything”, “People wanted to see the workshops, that kind of thing”, “I didn’t see the rubber tree”, “I didn’t see much because visiting a factory with nobody working…”, etc.). The Oxford English Dictionary defnes the verb to see as: discern by use of the eyes, discern mentally. I suggest the following premise: the object hidden from the walkers is what could have feshed out the myth fuelled by the locals themselves. The visitors hoped to see the myth reveal itself, especially as the press had announced it. However, it is precisely because the myth is built on mechanisms that do not reveal themselves only to the eyes that it functions. Even admitting that the myth might have been revealed by a hidden reifcation in the workshops, we could then assume that the walkers’ disappointment was real for two reasons. Firstly, because the participants would have realised that there was actually nothing to see. They would have been disappointed to fnd that the Michelin myth and spirit are not based on anything that can be immediately perceived. This is clearly conveyed by this statement:

But I would have liked to see the offces, or even the dining areas, if you want. It’s probably nothing special, but still. (Mrs. Randon)

Secondly because the Michelin family would have departed from the rule of secrecy and confrmed the predictions of the press. Yet not having seen keeps the secret and in so doing it reassures, giving way not so much to irony as to relief. Make no mistake. In no way does this mean that this is a conscious act of the company owners as they are themselves caught up and possibly overwhelmed by what they represent and by the impact of their discourse.

7.2.2.5 Still Keeping a Promise

That was rather strange: how is it possible that people who are said to be enslaved by the company want to see the place of enslavement? Odd, isn’t it? […]. There was a kind of support for these places by people who could not be considered to be on orders as they were no longer with the company. And when I saw the crowds going through the city, good grief! That wasn’t really repulsion! There was a strong curiosity, there was also a certain support for the company. It’s not that we were proud of Michelin, but after all… well. Michelin, it matters a lot in the reality of Clermont. (Mr. Géol, geographer) 200 C. VÉDRINE

The presence of 15,000 participants would suggest that Michelin always strings the people of Clermont-Ferrand along. And, as we saw, although that day nothing could be seen, much was told about work, the family, secrecy, asceticism, paternalism, the Michelin values, the grip on Clermont, etc.: in other words, about the Michelin spirit and myth. The walk was punctuated, as I said, by “It makes you think”, “You wonder”, “Can you imagine today?”, “I’m thinking about”. Because nothing could be seen that day, Le Dimanche du piéton was not only an opportunity to ascertain that the Michelin spirit and myth were still alive and kicking, but also to play a role in maintaining the myth by telling stories.

I thought I’d see people at work… I was naive, maybe to see a machine operate or something”, “It was bluff! Because my knowledge about Michelin hasn’t changed, I haven’t gained anything from this walk. (Madame Randon)

The “knowledge” about the way the system works had not been enhanced. And if this lady blames herself for being naive and disappointed as a result, it is because she forgot for a while that, on that day, she was not going to visit a scripted and staged environment but rather that she was going “to Michelin’s”, an elusive entity to say the least. When she refers to “illusion” and “bluff”, she challenges the event aspect announced by the press. Far from being the breakdown of intel- ligibility implied by the event with the establishment of a new era, it is about guaranteeing continuity. What seemed to be the staging of nothing proves to be the staging of Michelin, conducted not by the company owners or the organisers but by the people of Clermont-Ferrand themselves. The event announced by the press did therefore not take place and the policy of openness announced by the company did not have the expected impact. The company’s brand image strategy utterly failed despite La Montagne’s support. In the following days, the newspaper unremittedly affrmed Édouard Michelin’s policy of openness and reported participant satisfaction, owing to the new director who was praised for this new open-mindedness: “eyes shining […] some ramblers, surprised to see Édouard Michelin himself earlier pacing up and down in front of them, had a few kind words. Noëlle, a teacher, gets started frst: ‘Well done for what you’re doing, keep up the good work for Clermont’. 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 201

Others joined in. Each time adding a ‘Thank you’ or ‘It’s great you opened your factories’ to their comments. Touched by these tokens hint- ing at affection, the company director with 130,000 employees allowed himself one comment mezza voce: ‘Industrial life is about human contact, simple and genuine. Today is a bit an extension of this…’” (La Montagne, 25 June 2001). “It’s an historic and moving event. This visit symbolises Michelin’s openness to the city and to the world”, the Chamina chairman tells the newspaper. The mayor, Serge Godard, in attendance for the same marketing reasons, adds: “It’s an event that puts the city on the map as a metropolis. When Michelin moves, the world and Europe know it. And that’s good for Clermont”. It should be noted that the journalists from La Montagne, who announced the collapse of the Michelin myth, if anything boosted it again by portraying Édouard Michelin as patron saint, with a headline contrasting sharply with previous articles: “15,000 Visitors at the Heart of the Michelin Myth”. Many employees, not fooled by the marketing effect of this Dimanche du piéton laughed to see the locals rushing and falling for this trick:

Me, I didn’t do the walk, because taking part in something where you see walls and nothing, super controlled so there’s no spilling out, as if there’s a sheer drop on either side of where you’re going to walk… There’s really no point. People say: ‘Yeah, but we did go through the Michelin factory’, yeah okay ‘And what did you see inside?’. It would be interesting though if Michelin opened its doors when people are working in the factory, you see? For example, you take people there, where they literally paint the boards in black but also paint a dark picture, and then you take them to Z, the mixing place, when they work. Yeah, then I’d say okay. To see for real how the guys work. Or to production, the tyre manufacturing and all that. Then you’re visiting something, yes. But walking through the factory and only seeing walls… pointless. But well, people have different ways of enjoying themselves. I’d rather climb the Puy-de-Dôme! Honestly! It’s more enjoyable. (Mr. Cédis, professional agent, aged 58)

In conclusion, what stood out that day is that the people of Clermont-Ferrand came to see and to check that the company, despite the transfer of power from François to Édouard Michelin, still fulfls its role: the one it gave itself and that continues being attributed to it. “Michelin” always promises the object (which adjusts its shape and content according to the person it is meant for). Since it does not match the expectations of the people of Clermont-Ferrand, because it is 202 C. VÉDRINE imagined and symbolic, the object becomes elusive, generating disappointment turning into frustration and feshing out a rewording, a new demand and a possible return:

It’s really left me wanting more [….] I expected something else. I thought… we were going to… basically there was this world I wanted to discover, the workshops, but we didn’t see one bit of it! So I’m kind of frustrated about that! (Miss Artage)

That day provided assurance of the robustness of the myth whose aim is still to create a social bond. This bond was reaffrmed on that occasion around the federator “Michelin”, with the help of two main tools, namely stories and maintaining the spirit. A promise was also made, to continue guaranteeing and being responsible for the course of things— both the good and the bad—a place as complex as it is ambiguous as it vacillates between the protective and the tyrannical “Michelin”. The same is true for the gaze, embodied by the presumed camera presence, seen sometimes as being intrusive because it is tantamount to control, yet sometimes as benevolent because it means attention. At the locals’ request, the promise to continue playing the role of benchmark, that is either endorsed or rebelled against, has thus been kept. * In conclusion to this part, the following points are to be remembered:

– The father’s gaze has declined and, more generally, “Michelin’s” eyes have moved away to other continents. The averted look suggested by relocation and investing abroad, has given rise to a feeling of abandonment, if not contempt: the workforce reduction in Clermont- Ferrand is experienced as a real betrayal. Even the end of career development has put an end to the workers’ indebted and grateful gaze towards their employer. In this context, behind the nostalgia for the complete care they once enjoyed, the Bibs, now awaiting retirement, feel bitter and resentful. – For many, it is impossible to stop believing the Michelin myth, and the empowerment of the Bibs and the locals proves to be diffcult. Conscious that the company can now do without them, the workers are helpless now that they have to look after themselves. The autonomy that the young managers have demanded for so long, 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 203

and which as we saw earlier is not unfounded, is actually something the workers struggle with as, with the disappearance of an element of the structuring Michelin spirit, they have lost protection, security and reference points. But desacralising and no longer believing the mythical Michelin stories involves taking a stance and empowerment, which in turn call for having to both rethink the world to which the individual belongs and its foundation, and “re-nego- tiate their place and their role in society, ultimately their citizenship” (Pardo and Prato 2010, 16; Spyridakis 2010). Desacralising is marked by deeds: resigning can be one, speaking out or transgressing the code of silence is another. However, we have seen that the people of Clermont-Ferrand also require stable reference points in the city of which Michelin is part. Desacralising “Michelin” seems diffcult insofar as, even when the Bibs and the locals criticise or take exception to the company in public, Michelin is always at the heart of their concerns. Real desacralisation would not result in collective resentment but rather in general indifference. If “Michelin” embodies evil instead of good, it nevertheless plays a central role, namely that of the entity responsible for and guaranteeing the course of things. We noticed that the Clermont-Ferrand people who are offended by the Michelin system are the same people who roamed the internal streets of the company the day of the Dimanche du piéton…: the empowerment question is more complex than it seems. – Tolerable versus intolerable. Michelin’s slow desacralisation rather seems to be the expression of what becomes unbearable in the absence of the security that paternalism used to provide. The demands for security and recognition arise when the gaze turns away. It is also when these demands seem fruitless and the gaze has defnitively turned away that the workers, overcome by a sense of injustice and contempt, start to a desacralise the company. The social insecurity and vulnerability it implies (Castel 2003) lead to a sense of abandonment and betrayal. These feelings have fuelled resentment and nostalgia for the social relations produced by the paternalistic system between the employer and his employees, and forged by the employees among themselves. The frst type of tie has vanished, whereas the second is eroding in a context in which the workshops become empty and there are fewer and fewer people the “old-timers” can transmit their know-how to. 204 C. VÉDRINE

– More generally, what is stake here is the notion of citizenship, as defned by Italo Pardo and Giuliana Prato: “citizenship cannot be merely defned in legal and political terms; it needs to include socio-economic, civil and cultural rights – rights that give real meaning to belonging, sharing and participation in the common good” (2010, 18). And we can see in the case of Michelin that “what people demand is quite simply the fulflment of fundamental rights of citizenship” (op. cit.). Indeed, people are not puppets (Pardo 1996; Spyridakis 2013) in their relation to the “moral entrepreneurs” described in Chapter 5. Our ethnography shows that they are not “obeying some arbitrary morality; they must, instead, take up the complex cultural, political, economic and juridical instances of citizenship” (Pardo and Prato, op. cit.). This is why they are affected by actions “which they resent as morally illegitimate” (Pardo 2012, 72). And it also explains why they are able to put up resistance. – The question of recognition at the root of desacralisation. The question of recognition is key for understanding desacralisation and cannot be conceived without the notions of dignity and honour based on the gaze and the voice. Since the workers are no longer looked at through the lens of recognition, they carry their voices to the public arena. Through the trade union discrimination court case and the flm Paroles de Bibs, the employees have reclaimed dignity and obtained recognition from the legal system and civil society. Public recognition attempts to replace recognition by the “father”. It is not so much a demand for recognition of their work that is expressed here, although it should not be overlooked, but rather for recognition of the person. Contempt is denounced by stating inequalities and between the equality principle and the autonomy principle; the demand is that the person be treated as an individual and universal subject: “this arrangement is called recognition” (Dubet 2005, 519*). It is about receiving recognition as a person at work: “The desire to be recognised” which “can take a number of forms”, the “recognition of the dignity and the usefulness of the work carried out” (op. cit.), as well as the hardship. The recognition that the employees seek concerns the hierarchy: “in this case injustice is not the direct result of the way work is organised, but of the nature of interpersonal relations, of ‘looks’ and ‘words’ that hurt, humili- ate and are experienced as a denial of people and personalities” (op. cit., 520*). 7 BETWEEN DESACRALISATION AND FEELINGS OF AMBIVALENCE 205

– The decline of the benevolent fatherly gaze leads by the same token to rethinking, by those who criticised it, the paternalistic system that provided a framework. Therefore, the trade unionists who fought against an enslavement system admit today: “Surely, we’re not going to regret paternalism!? Although it’s worse nowadays. You’d think it was better before, at least the workers were taken care of […]Édouard Michelin, he’s an American. At least, with paternalism, it was about people, with him, it’s about money”. – Fairness, unfairness and forgiveness. Notions of justice and injustice beg the question of forgiveness. If the “father” is not forgiven for abandoning the employees, it necessarily stirs feelings of resentment. We saw that many have shifted the blame from “father” François onto his son, forgiving through amnesia the “father” who “had no choice” and fostering an even greater bitterness towards the son, the symbol of change. “Respect […] is quite suffcient to prompt forgiving”, writes Hanna Arendt (1998, 243), yet respect for the “father” is even deeper. Others, however, are unable to forgive the abandonment, the betrayal and the contempt they feel the victims of. The impossibility to forgive is what makes something unforgivable (Ricœur 2006, 468): “If I forgive what is forgivable, a venial sin, a non mortal sin, I do not do anything deserving to be called forgiveness. Hence the aporia: one must only ever forgive what is unforgivable. We call this working miracles” (Derrida 2000, 21*), helped by the “guilty party” who, by asking for forgiveness “is already, to a certain extent, someone else” (op. cit., 20*). It turns out that the person (the employer) or persons (the hierarchy) whom the employees need to forgive do not feel that they have done anything wrong, “existential presupposition of forgiveness” (Ricœur 2006, 459), or that they have been unfair or broke a promise that was nonetheless made, such as to keep the number of employees in Clermont-Ferrand at 18,000. It is interesting in this respect that François Michelin asked for forgiveness through the homily given at his funeral. Its impact is yet to be seen…

The accusations of psychological harassment, of trade union discrimination and lack of recognition made in Paroles de Bibs make “Michelin” a defendant, raising “the connection between forgiveness and punishment. The axiom goes as follows: in this social dimension, one can forgive only where one can punish; and one must punish where there has been an 206 C. VÉDRINE infraction of the common rules” “the connection between forgiveness and punishment. The axiom goes as follows: in this social dimension, one can forgive only where one can punish; and one must punish where there has been an infraction of the common rules” (Ricœur 2006, 470). Involving the legal system therefore allows to move beyond the desire for revenge that stands in stark contrast to forgiveness (Arendt 1998; Ricœur 2006) and to ease the sense of injustice by recognising it, thus securing common peace. – The Bibs’ worry, for their children in particular and for young people in general, concerns more the collapse of the chain of transmission of professional know-how and the Michelin spirit, namely soft skills together with a set of values, which are the Bibs’ pride and joy. Not to mention, for the trade union members, the fear to see the militant culture as they have known it, disappear. Clermont-Ferrand has successfully converted its economy into the services sector and, lastly, perhaps the workforce reduction at Michelin has allowed the younger generation to escape its grip. A study looking at where the children of Bibs are today would certainly be interesting. Did they have to work in other factories in other cities or were they able to access other jobs and social mobility? The children of the Bibs I met are in the second category… Whereas only ffteen years ago Bibs would have encouraged their children to join Michelin, today, in view of the workforce reduction, they encourage them to do something different. In that sense, a whole generation may have escaped the Michelin system.

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Conclusion

8.1 back to the Initial Assumptions: Spirit of Capitalism, Recognition and Citizenship In this ethnographic work, I have tried to describe what could be termed a justifcation sequence, by showing how Michelin has constructed a myth that justifes its business spirit, which in turn justifes capitalism according to Michelin. We have seen that the Michelin spirit corresponds at the same time to a patriarchal model, whose key fgure is the “father”, to moral and religious values, to standards of secrecy and asceticism, and to representations that capture the imagination of the people of Clermont-Ferrand. This is the spirit of capitalism according to Michelin. It justifes commitment to the company by refecting the changes in capitalism whose ethical principles it governs. From the 1980s onwards, the Michelin spirit has gradually evolved to justify a new international capitalism to the executives who, in the words of Boltanski and Chiapello (op.cit.), have become the new industrial driving forces that keep growing (25% of the employees in 2012 are on the company’s French sites—49% if other staff are included). However, although the managerial model has replaced the patriarchal model, inside the company the standards of the Michelin

© The Author(s) 2019 209 C. Védrine, The Spirit of Capitalism According to the Michelin Company, Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96610-6_8 210 C. VÉDRINE spirit have not changed. Secrecy and asceticism are no longer mobilised for the beneft of the “father”, but rather of the “frm”,1 which has become a cradle of technology, creation, progress, modernity and change. The young executives have welcomed this shift, which they refer to as a “cultural revolution”. In the process, the ever-present moral and Christian values have evolved, with freedom replacing loyalty. The Michelin spirit is also in keeping with a company culture that creates a common identifcation with various social membership groups by bringing the employees together through shared values and standards. This echoes the works of economic anthropologists such as Italo Pardo (1996) who shows that the concept of work is associated with cultural and moral values and practices and is “connected to all sorts of activities concerned with subsistence and the reproduction of society as a whole and mediated by domestic activities, by ceremonial and ritual processes and by social networks” (Spyridakis 2013, 6). Since the spirit of capitalism is an ideology that provides the employees with reasons to commit and remain loyal to it, it appears that the company culture refects how this spirit has been implemented in a given company. To conclude this research, I will say that ultimately a company culture expresses the way in which that particular company has custom- ised the spirit of capitalism. I would therefore favour the concept of spirit of capitalism over that of company culture, since the former implies the latter. However, culture remains an important notion, despite the fact that it has a signifcant number of defnitions and that it is rather controversial, to refer to the workings of the transmission of the Michelin spirit, while emphasising that its members cultivate it as a set of social skills. To the people of Clermont-Ferrand, the Michelin spirit is closer to the concept of ethos. We have seen that they perceive Michelin primarily as a standardising system. Furthermore, representations linked to the Michelin spirit, local oral memory and the mythical stories have together created an urban imagery among Clermont-Ferrand people. What is more, LeDimanche du piéton has shown that for the local population the elements of the Michelin spirit are the elements of a code to interpret the industrial and social spaces created by the company, as paternalism, secrecy and asceticism ooze from the city walls. Of course, not everyone in Clermont-Ferrand is a Bib and the city does not revolve around the

1 See Note 2. 8 CONCLUSION 211 company, but every resident in Clermont-Ferrand has at least one Bib among their friends and relatives and Clermont-Ferrand cannot do without Michelin. With regard to the construction of the Michelin myth, we have seen that it allows to justify the company spirit. The mythical narrative reveals the values and laws, and acts as an example to be followed, since the philosophy that is delivered and circulated within and by the company struc- tures the world of work, as well as daily and local urban life. However, the demise of paternalism, the decline in local recruitment, the rise of executives and the impact of the fexibility inherent to the “new spirit of capitalism” have sparked a feeling of social insecurity and abandonment among the workers. The liminal worker described by Manos Spyridakis, which “points to the fact of a constant condition of liminality as a lived experience of workers in a post-Keynesian and de-industrialised framework” (Spyridakis op.cit., 1), is incarnated here by the Bibs who are feeling both abandoned and sometimes concerned by the redundancy plans as they are moved to disqualifed posts. This liminal working condition, says Manos Spyridakis, reminds us “that, in the so called post-industrial period of tertiarisation, the relations of exploitation and of inequality during and after the labour process have not essentially changed, and that the Marxian notion of real subordination of workers to capital is still an inexorable reality” (Spyridakis op.cit., 3), as can be seen in the work challenges facing the Michelin executives (and described by different authors, for example Boltanski 1982; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; or Sennett 1998). Concerning the workers, the transformation of capitalism has uncovered the ideological dimension of the company spirit. In the absence of protection and recognition, the Bibs can no longer tol- erate the internal company policy and start a process of desacralising the Michelin myth. This process shows that workers do not accept their condition uncritically or unconditionally (Spyridakis 2010). And we can even say that by mobilising legitimacy and morality, ‘it would be useful to recognize that people are challengingly engaged in negotiating the terms of their citizenship’ (Pardo 2010, 7)”. If a “reasonably, working balance in the relationship between citizenship and governance is by defnition directly dependent upon the recognized structuration of legitimacy and the attendant exercise of rights, obligations and responsibility on both sides of the spectrum” (Pardo 2010, 25), the desacralisation of the frm specifcally expresses (1) the lack of trust towards the boss in particular and towards the “system” in general, (2) yet at the same time it expresses 212 C. VÉDRINE the central role of the spirit and the myth in the construction of citizenship for the Bibs. Yet, although the fgure of the “father” is absent from the new spirit of capitalism, the fgure of “Michelin” as a moral and mythical entity lives on, such is its signifcance as a benchmark for the employees and the people of Clermont-Ferrand, whose importance was conveyed by Le Dimanche du piéton. Michelin has not only been a symbolic father, that is, the embodiment of the paternalistic model for the workers, but also for the local population who are grateful to the man feeding and educating the city. In this respect, desacralisation has been tentative. The ambiguous relations between the workforce and their employer on the one hand, and between the city and the company on the other explain the resistance against resistance, a process that would lead to rethinking the world around them (Védrine 2009). Also, the concept of the gaze seems to be a key element of this research. Mostly it concerns the diffculty to keep the gaze trained on oneself, and its impact when it moves away. The “regulated forms of recognition” (Honneth 2004, 134*) help us understand the process of integration in and identifcation with the Michelin company, since “in the eyes of their members, societies are made of arrangements and institutions that are legitimate only insofar as they are able to guarantee, at different levels, that relations of authentic mutual recognition are preserved”, which ensures integration in a social group (op.cit., 134). In the absence of recognition, humiliation and contempt emerge. At the same time, a demand for recognition emerges and, more broadly, the demand for recognition of the human condition and the citizenship condition. It is because people are interested in other aspects of work (Pardo 1996; Spyridakis 2013) that, in fne, workers are defending their “fundamental rights of citizenship” (Pardo and Prato 2010, 18). Since they are part of institutions, the latter condition and create expectations of recognition (Renault 2004, 184*). If recognition is to do with the gaze, it is because the issue is not physical but social visibility or invisibility. We have seen to what extent the new resistance modes have replaced paternal recognition with civil and legal recognition, by making themselves visible in new public spaces. It should be emphasised that the indifference or invisibility of the individuals concerned is no longer metaphorical at that point, as pointed out by Honneth (op.cit., 137*), as they really feel that they are unseen. Similarly, when a city such as Clermont-Ferrand embarks on an image policy, it does so to show and keep their eyes on a city that has 8 CONCLUSION 213 been ignored, scorned even. As the deputy head of town planning said to me about a new tram with tyres in Clermont-Ferrand: “Trams are quite a novelty and they will probably be much looked at”. Lastly, my ethnographic description charts the way in which the employees of one of the major global companies view the changing world. The changes in capitalism in general and in the Michelin company in particular have led to the demise of paternalism and a decline in the number of workers in favour of an increase in the number of executives. This has at least two consequences. The frst concerns the need to think the Michelin myth on an international scale by mobilising the concept of industrial heritage. The second consequence concerns urban development, which expresses the need for a city to adapt to the industrial and social changes of its main employer, taxpayer and landowner. I will come back to these two points, which provide new research avenues in urban anthropology. But frst, let us return to Édouard Michelin’s fatal accident, which happened as I was fnalising this book. The reaction to this event has, on the one hand, publicly shattered the company’s mythical dimension. On the other hand, it has revealed the ambiguous feelings uniting the Bibs, the people of Clermont-Ferrand and the company, by expressing in particular the fall of the personifed local myth.

8.2 the Brutal End of a Promise Personified—The Death of Édouard Michelin Édouard Michelin died at sea on Friday 26 May 2006. The death of the young chairman stirred up strong emotion in Clermont-Ferrand. Firstly, because it was the brutal result of an accident. Secondly, because they were burying a Michelin, while just mentioning his name was enough to symbolise the strength and continuity of the company, the myth and the spirit. Finally, because his death marked the beginning of a new era and emphasised the concerns about the company’s future in Clermont- Ferrand. “It’s over for Michelin”, it was said, as if with Édouard Michelin’s death a system embodied by a name were collapsing and a local story were ending. In addition, the feeling of abandonment intensi- fed with the passing of the man who was meant to transmit the Michelin name and spirit. The Bibs and the locals were stunned by the death of the man who broke away from his father’s policy while still being his suc- cessor. He symbolised the frm promise to uphold the role of benchmark, 214 C. VÉDRINE the strength of the system as well as the family dimension of the company, that fuelled local identifcation and pride. Between Saturday 27 and Thursday 31 May 2006, the day of his funeral, the streets of Clermont-Ferrand were abuzz with talk about the “tragedy”. In the days following the announcement that the chairman had died, the residents went to the headquarters at Les Carmes in droves, to write condolence messages to the family in notebooks provided to that effect at the visitors’ reception at the factory. The day before the funeral, the locals could also pay their last respects to Édouard Michelin in a funeral chapel inside the Clermont-Ferrand cathedral. The 31st of May brought out in the light of day the mythical dimension of Michelin as well as the ambiguous feelings towards the eponymous family. In the course of that morning, “real” and “fake” Bibs, retired company staff and local residents followed one another at the coffn of the deceased. Emotions ran high. Most people returned in tears and wrote a few words in the condolence book at the entrance. On that occasion, I met a number of Bibs I had previously spoken with, who now were too upset to talk. Around and inside the cathedral, the substantial number of media in attendance highlighted the signifcance of that day. The wide media coverage (national press, television and radio) and the presence of local, regional and national politicians, as well as heads of company, contributed to the solemnity of the event. To allow the people of Clermont-Ferrand to attend the ceremony that afternoon, four giant screens had been set up, three around the cathedral and one at the Marcel Michelin stadium. Around 10,000 people were able to attend the funeral in this way. Let us make no mistake. We have to remember that at that time 14,000 people were employed by the company in Clermont-Ferrand. Not all of them attended the funeral: two-thirds did not. The Bibs who were on duty that day were allowed to go and pay their respects at the stadium, but not all of them did. Whether employees, retired staff or local residents, many came out of curiosity. Others, the vast majority, to follow the ceremony, from a religious perspective or not. Some people knelt down to pray, and one person fainted and had to be taken away by the fre service. It was such an inconceivable event that people seemed incredulous. People’s affection for the Michelin family was fully expressed and many said that they felt as if they were taking their own relative to his last resting place. 8 CONCLUSION 215

It was effectively the burial of “the son”. His demise provided him straight away with a greatness which he lacked until then. In the condolence books tribute was paid to the “great man”, the “great Christian”, “his great personality”, his “great simplicity” and his “great discretion”. The gratitude of the local population to the company was also apparent: “thank you for everything you have done for Clermont”, “thank you for everything”, “thank you for the region”, etc. We can thus see collective bad faith emerging and, at the same time, a combination of forgetting and forgiving elevated Édouard Michelin as a new mythical fgure around whom three narratives were taking shape. According to the frst narrative, stemming from political spokespeople, Bibs and local residents, Édouard Michelin was the one who had sought to keep the company in Clermont-Ferrand because of his deep attachment to Auvergne. Through this narrative that emphasises the concept of loyalty, we catch a glimpse of the real fear, so often widely voiced, that the company may move to Paris. The second narrative, told by the Bibs and the people of Clermont-Ferrand, portray Édouard Michelin’s simplicity, discretion and his kind attention, especially towards the residents and shopkeepers in his neighbourhood, where he was a regular. It should be noted that many businesses had placed a bow in the colours of the company (yellow and blue) in their window display as a sign of mourning. The third narrative, also told by the Bibs and the locals, places the death of the young chairman in a family destiny marred by tragedy. Édouard Michelin died in an accident, just like his great-uncles, whose demise had prompted the founder Édouard Michelin to appoint his son-in-law, Robert Puiseux, to the head of the company (the tragedy continued with the death of Cécile Michelin, who died of cancer in November 2011 at the age of forty-four). The immediate consequence of Édouard Michelin’s death was the end of a living myth. The Bibs and the locals were saddened by his death and this accelerated the process of empowerment. It should be added that, regardless of what the future would bring under new management, in all likelihood the Bibs, through some kind of amnesia, will protest and claim that “in Édouard’s days, this would never have happened…”. His death has therefore kindled the Michelin myth, which receives an added layer with a new subject-hero. In other words, faced with the disarray caused by the young chairman’s death, mythical stories produced by the Bibs and the locals started unfolding. 216 C. VÉDRINE

Édouard Michelin’s death has put an end, at least temporarily, to the continuity of a surname. Now that the company is no longer managed by a member of the Michelin family, it is the end of charisma, in the Weberian sense, that embodies the possibility of a symbolic identifcation with the community. More than ever, Édouard Michelin’s death marks the end of the continuity of the living myth in favour of an identifcation with the “frm” [maison] epitomised by Bibendum, the mythical marketing character.

8.3 the Local Impact of the Development of Capitalism and Its Spirit Applying urban anthropology in a post-industrial context allows us (1) to highlight the relationship between the international transformations of capitalism (of which Michelin is a major actors) and its local effects, between the macro and the micro level (Prato 2012) through an ethnographic approach, and (2) to understand how the ideology of capitalism (or its spirit) is expressed in the urban space through the study of its transformations as described by the actors and their experience. In Clermont-Ferrand, the end of paternalism, the reduced workforce and the increasing number of executives have had a direct impact on the city, be it socially, culturally, economically, politically, or from an urban perspective. Each aspect would require special consideration to understand the current changes affecting the city. For now, I have identifed three lines of enquiry that deserve to be developed in future research.

8.3.1 Mobilising Heritage for the Beneft of the New Michelin Spirit: A New Interplay Between History, Memory and Myth My frst line of suggested enquiry concerns mobilising heritage to reas- sess the myth in a national and international perspective. We have seen that the Michelin myth allows to conceive of shared history and, consequently, of collective identity and recognition in the sense of recognising oneself in the exemplary mythical fgures and in the sense of being grateful [avoir de la reconnaissance] for these heroes. The example of the Michelin company illustrates how capitalist societies create myths to justify the system and the ideology supporting the way social relations are managed and regulated. As Baczko points out, “our modern societies, 8 CONCLUSION 217 disillusioned as they may be, continue to produce their own mythology” (1984, 116*), the preferred tool to handle the collective imagination and, beyond that, the “representations that create the legitimacy” (op. cit., 33*) of power. It is in fact when recognition modes are shaken that desacralisation sets in. In other words, as soon as Michelin no longer is exemplary, his legitimacy and mythical character collapse. The resulting counter-narratives, whose contents have been sourced from individual and social memory, have a desacralising effect in that they resist manipulated memory by re-establishing or revealing the truth. In order to restore its myth, the company uses the tool of patrimony to give its founding and justifying myths a national and international scope. Initially, the company viewed the registration of the historic monuments of the chimney of Les Carmes and the Cataroux tracks,2 evidence of Michelin’s industrial activity, on the Supplementary Historic Monument List with a certain coolness, if not indifference. The application for the tracks to be listed as historic monument had been fled by the municipality of Clermont-Ferrand. For the city, it meant using cultural mediation to redefne its identity and reshape its image by making so-called “noteworthy” industrial sites part of heritage. It results from a wish to “protect” an “exceptional building”, “one of its kind in the world”. This “hideous” “work”, a “modern times cathedral”, in the words of the urban planning deputy, had to be preserved. Firstly, because it is linked to the history of the city and has to refect its part in “the vast ‘civilisation’ movement” (Rautenberg 2003, 148*). Secondly, because it is one of its “exceptional buildings”, and lastly because it is a mythical object. Subsequently Michelin picked up on the municipality’s interest for the site, specifcally for its mythical dimension. For the company, this process of sacralising heritage was another opportunity to reinvigorate its locally shaken myth, by implementing an image policy for its shareholders and executives from all over the world. The year 2009 saw the opening of the “Offcial Cultural Site of the Michelin Group”. Christened “The Michelin Adventure”, it showcases the company’s technological and marketing excellence and displays objects which were hitherto kept in a private conservatory (Information and Meeting Centre Michelin), which was opened to the public during the Heritage Days [Journées du patrimoine].

2 The closure in 2001 created 7 hectares of brownfeld land out of the thirty-fve hectares covered by factory. 218 C. VÉDRINE

“The Michelin Adventure”, displaying the “largest tyre in the world” at its entrance, consists of 12 “spaces”: “Mobility at the End of the 19th Century”, “On the Road”, “In the Air”, “On the Rail Tracks”, “Michelin and Clermont-Ferrand”, “Square Bibendum”, “The World on Demand” (showing road maps, Michelin guides and signposts), “Radial Revolution”, “The Challenges of Mobility” and “Showroom and Ludospace” (screening a flm about the company’s involvement in the Le Mans 24 hours race and providing car video games). In the “reception area”, a Micheline and a Breguet-Michelin plane are on display, while the “boutique space” at the end of the visit sells road maps, books and post- cards, as well as a range of items featuring Bibendum (clothes for babies, children and adults, crockery, stationery, etc.). Analysing the “Michelin Adventure” would require an in-depth study which I have not done. However, I would venture a few remarks and put forward a few assumptions. Showcasing how the company is “a constant source of innovation” with a “passion driving the Michelin teams to tackle the challenges of tomorrow” (from the offcial website https:// laventure.michelin.com/en), “it naturally emphasises both [the] historical specifcity and [the] exemplarity” (Caron 1997, 3310*) of the technology and creativity that fuel the fascination exercised by the company. The visitor is presented with the evolution of Michelin tyres, the company’s various technological and cultural inventions (tyres and vehicles, from bicycles to racing cars via motorcycles, model planes and the Micheline are exhibited), but also values such as resourcefulness, inventiveness, modernity, quality, competition, excellence, and benevolence, the latter embodied by Bibendum who watches over drivers. Evidence of their effectiveness from winning competitive races adds to the scientifc discourse, a token of Michelin’s mastery of cutting-edge technology. The exhibited items and texts (all in French and English) are supports and carriers of the mythical Michelin stories, which on the one hand highlight the company’s contribution to the national and international wealth and pride, and on the other showcase Michelin as a demiurge of the world of cars. This means that the salvation stories and the stories about the founding fathers, although present, are downplayed so as to emphasise the narratives showing the company values, the creation stories and the challenge stories through photographs, objects (such as the Éclair car), and narratives displayed on boards. Far from being a backward and nostalgic concept, Michelin approaches the notion of heritage as a new tool to reaffrm its myth to 8 CONCLUSION 219 the nation, even to civilisation. It is therefore easy to understand why Bibendum is given such importance, as the company’s global ambassador, whose fame largely exceeds that of the family that can only be matched on a local scale. Bibendum welcomes the visitors and guides them during this “Adventure”, and even invites them to have their picture taken with him thanks to a digital screen. The local “father” fgure intrinsic to the Michelin spirit has been superseded by the double patriotic and universal kindly fgure, embodied on the one hand by Bibendum’s geniality and on the other by heritage. Because everybody loves the mythical Bibendum, loving this powerful marketing tool means, metonymically, loving Michelin. Through the shift from the exemplary paternalistic fgure to the exemplary industrial and creative fgure, the embodiment of a responsible, recognisable and blameable character has crumbled. The “Michelin Adventure” is an example of how heritage and scientifc discourse are used to bring out the competitiveness of a company and nurture an industrial myth. It belongs to a period during which Michelin had to step up signs of openness and communication to fght off its damaging outdated image. The company with a reputation for secrecy can no longer turn its back on an image-driven society. It has to fnd a balance between the need to be less discreet and accepting to open itself to public view on the site of its headquarters. By allowing a little ostentation, it demonstrates its technological, industrial, cultural and economic powers. Although the hidden face of the empire does remain hidden, the company has created a remarkable communication tool here, all the more effective as it offers an online virtual visit. Thus, just as memory has been manipulated for the construction of a local myth, heritage is used for its international dimension, as conveyed by Bibendum. In order to be universal, the mythical stories should be narratable anywhere, just as the objects could be exhibited in any country in the world. One point deserves our attention. If in the old conservatory, local history was absent from a discourse exclusively geared towards technology, the “Michelin and Clermont-Ferrand space” at the “Michelin Adventure” is a prime example of how capitalism anticipates criticism and feeds on it. In this room, where a sign indicates that the topic is “Work and Health”, the care given to the workers during the paternalistic area is illustrated with photographs of the ASM’s sporting activities. A sign displays the moral and Christian values instilled in the Bibs, while the care for children through school education and quality leisure 220 C. VÉDRINE activities (such as the summer camps) is presented through fve audio accounts. In the same room, visitors can discover the internal plans of a workers’ housing estate and thus assess the comfort, goodwill and gen- erosity offered to the Bibs. All the more so as the latter express, in the interview excerpts that can be listened to, their gratitude towards the Firm. In other words, Michelin provides enough elements to avoid the criticism that could have been levelled against it before, namely that it refuses to talk about local history and the way the workforce is socially managed. Of course, nothing is really being said about either social history or work as such (except in terms of pride and know-how). The employees often disappear behind a discourse that is either patrimonial, by exhibit- ing photographs of the old workshops which create an historic distance from the visitor, or scientifc and marketing-oriented, by showing the pride to belong to such a brilliant and human company. When industrial heritage is mentioned in Clermont-Ferrand, it is therefore always with a view to presenting the Michelin myth free from a social history that could desacralise it, rather than to preserving the signs evidencing the history to which the Bibs and the people of Clermont-Ferrand more generally would be more attached, a history that is actually never mentioned. Highlighting heritage, thus transform- ing the workspaces into “remarkable objects” and evidence of outstand- ing technology, does not allow any thought about what is going on. It expunges social history and the collective memory connected to places and erases, with one heritage sweep, the local problems linked to desacralisation, resentment and injustice. What is more, this new mythical discourse advocated by Michelin with the complicity of the municipality, silences the workers again and reduces them to invisibility again, while the workers are deeply concerned about their workplace being made part of heritage:

“If there is a museum, it’s… the mining museum, but there are no more miners, right? Worrying stuff” (Mr. Cédis, aged 58). “I work at the very end at Cataroux, towards the four ways there, towards the tracks. First, there were 1,200 of us and now there’s only 200 in my workshop. And they slowly narrow it down, and in there, it was the hard core of the Michelin factory, that place. […] And their story about organising and all that, it’s scary”. (Mr. Faure, aged 51). 8 CONCLUSION 221

This policy is all the more baffing for the Bibs as it is not justifed, as is often the case, for revitalising the rather healthy local economy. Rather, it is justifed by the concern for a prestige image in disregard of social unrest. This also kindles worries and feelings of indifference and lack of recognition of the Bibs, who are taken aback by the “Michelin Adventure”. With this “Adventure”, social speech is not only ignored (which is actually quite normal from the company’s point of view who will not hand out a stick to be beaten with), but also crushed: the company’s economic power is refected in a communication and staging power that successfully maintains the ambiguity and ambivalence that link the Bibs and the people of Clermont-Ferrand to Michelin: Michelin can be criticised on a number of accounts, but a visit to the “Michelin Adventure” helps to rekindle the mythical dimension and give a new substance to the fascination it produces. A quick tour at the “Michelin Adventure” and it starts again. It makes you think that Michelin really is quite a company…

8.3.2 A New Spirit of Capitalism Hinging on the Changing Industrial and Social Michelin Spaces—Reinvesting Through a New Awareness and a New Meaning My second line of suggested enquiry concerns the change of the Clermont-Ferrand spaces, as evidenced by the creation of the “Michelin Adventure”. The area most affected by the company’s social and industrial divestment is the one where Michelin primarily grew and thrived, between Clermont-Ferrand and Montferrand. The company built its Estaing factory there, which was demolished in 2005, freeing up fourteen hectares on which the University Hospital built a “Hospital Centre for Mother and Child” in 2008, while at the same time the municipality created a residential area and a business area for SMEs from the health sector. A few steps away, the Marcel Michelin stadium has been entirely refurbished and in 2001 the municipality built a concert hall called “May Cooperative” on the site of a former Socap. As far as the workers’ housing estates are concerned, Michelin started selling these off in 1984, one plot at a time. Until 1994, the company approached the tenants in frst instance, offering them to purchase the property, but subsequently it opened the sale of the houses to the whole of Clermont-Ferrand. 222 C. VÉDRINE

The remaining estates were then sold to social landlords, either to be renovated or to be demolished in order to build new housing. Some estates, like the ones along the boulevard République, were demolished for the land to be sold. Until very recently, only the properties of the Chanteranne estate, along the Cataroux factory, were still owned by Michelin. Whether the new owners are new arrivals or former tenants, the former Michelin districts have signifcantly changed in terms of make-up, landscape, use, practices and, thus, social life. Tall hedges put an end to surveillance among neighbours. The residents invest their own space according to their preferences and to what they are prepared to show. Necessity, which stayed far too long the central paternalistic focus, “has its limits, namely those dictated by desire”, Yves Chalas (1992, 151*) reminds us. Personal expression is no longer restricted to internal spaces but now erupts outside. Satisfying one’s needs as symbolised by growing one’s own vegetables contrasts with the pursuit of pleasure expressed through fower gardens, deckchairs, swings and other leisure and laziness items the company objected to. The opening up of the estates also involves at a revamping of the facades, their colours breaking with the earlier monotony and austerity. The arrival of commercial and administrative amenities ended isolation, the development of public spaces encouraged the residents to come out of the confnement that the Société d’Habitation Michelin (SHBM) had imposed on them until then, and the social reconfguration of the districts broke down social segregation. Middle-class families are keen to acquire these detached houses located in town, with garage and garden. With time, these new social strata will in all likelihood take over these areas, although the social landlords keep low income families in order to ensure a certain degree of social diversity. However, these families have little chance to integrate the upper classes, who prefer refurbished apartments in the old centre or villas in the suburbs. The main diversity is rather the one which increasingly sees Bibs and non-Bibs living side by side.

8.3.3 From Paternalism Towards the Workers to Urban Planning with a Marketing Slant Towards the Executives The third line of suggested enquiry assumes that in order to attract and keep “the new industrial driving forces” or what has been termed “the service class” in British sociology (Bidou-Zachariasen 2000) in Clermont-Ferrand, the municipality has worked on its image in 8 CONCLUSION 223 partnership with the Michelin company. Constrained by the risk of the company moving away (to another country or to Paris) which would be catastrophic for the region, the municipality needs to accommodate the company and is unable to oppose any of its projects. It is not about economically backing up the redevelopment of an industrial area following a downturn, but about politically supporting the evolution of one of the major global businesses. The “new spirit of capitalism” provides the executives with arguments for committing to their work, but its inherent mobility, fexibility and liberty translate into a signifcant turnover. Many stay for a few years at Michelin for “the business card”, as they say, or to develop their employ- ability before selling their skills on other markets. Again, the company is faced with the loyalty problem, which emerged during the period of industrial expansion but was resolved through paternalism. Since the new executives are unfamiliar with local history, there are two main reasons for them to stay at Michelin: job satisfaction and the quality of life offered by Clermont-Ferrand, a city that has suffered from bad publicity for a long time. A working-class city, black, secretive, austere—the qualifers used to describe it often mirrored the Michelin spirit (Védrine 2009). Thus, faced with the same concern of improving their reputation, Michelin and Clermont-Ferrand have developed since 1999 (the year of the “Michelin case”) a planning policy able to banish Michelinville to a bygone era. The statements made by the mayor and the new CEO from 1999 onwards tend towards an increasing autonomy of the city towards the company, encouraged by a new business and urban planning spirit conveyed by the national press.3 Clermont-Ferrand has neither the scale of a global city (Sassen 1991), nor is it in the position of a “loser” old industrial town (Rousseau 2008). Clermont-Ferrand has actually rather successfully carried out a con- version in the services sector, partly with the help of Michelin, more than counterbalancing the number of jobs lost in the local factories. An important number of jobs were created with the support of SIDE and MiLiVo. MiLiVo was born on 26 May 1999, involving Michelin, Limagrain and Volvic.4 Its aim is to support and provide technical help

3 Examples of headlines: “Clermont-Ferrand, The City that Would Like to Forget Michelin” (Libération, 21 September 1999); “A City in Search of a New Identity” (Le Monde, 3 February 2000). 4 In MiLiVo, Mi stands for Michelin, Li for Limagrin” and Vo for Volvic. 224 C. VÉDRINE to new business activities in the region, such as biotechnology and the food industry. The SIDE is a Michelin subsidiary dating back to 1990. It advises, sets up and fnances new business projects in sectors not covered by MiLiVo. It also aims to develop the regions with a Michelin presence. In practice, the SIDE contributes to creating jobs in small and medium-sized businesses and encourages the establishment of new companies. The SIDE could not be clearer regarding its objectives. It contributes to the “common interests” of businesses and regions with a view to injecting a local “momentum” or “vitality”. Two of its priority actions deserve our attention. Developing “effective” and “responsive” outsourcing, but also attracting executives, “high-level experts”, stimulating new arrivals “in a performing and diverse employment area” where spouses can fnd interesting work, and offering a “fulflling” quality of life (a) through a “wealth” of leisure and cultural activities and (b) through attractive living conditions… This is where the partnership with the municipality comes in, to equip Clermont-Ferrand and revamp it in a way that is worthy of the city where the headquarters of the industrial giant have pride of place… For its part, Michelin ensures that a less austere, less disciplinarian, more open and dynamic company spirit, that needs to be expressed through a spatial transformation, is relayed. Accordingly, the company renovated and refurbished its functioning but dilapidated factories, con- frming the workforce reduction by demolishing workshop space and turning it into offce space. As to the policy to rehabilitate the obsolete image of a paternalistic company, it concerns frst of all the refurbishment of the head offce, where executives from all over the world do their obligatory stint. The scenic consideration to showcase again the Tiretaine river, which owes its pollution levels to the company, and the creation of a glass house displaying rubber plants, are evidence of a new aesthetic while remaining faithful to its company spirit: simple and understated. We have seen that the “Michelin Adventure” is also an element of this openness communication policy. Regarding the city, as signifcant as the renovation and refurbishment works have been during the last few years, I would suggest some lines of enquiry about the works that concern the company directly or indirectly. The relationship between the municipality and the company mirrors that between the people of Clermont-Ferrand and Michelin, tinged with ambivalence and symbolic indebtedness. The reader will have noticed that the local authorities are hardly mentioned in this work, since the real 8 CONCLUSION 225 power is in the hands of the company, which has never made a direct political intervention (not even by supporting a candidate). Political science research would allow to assess Michelin’s impact on the social- ist municipality since 1944, as many local elected offcials are or have been Michelin employees. Michelin’s infuence on the city is still strongly felt as it remains its main employer, tax payer and landowner. Including wages, retirement, taxes and indirect employment (in particular in relation to outsourcing), La Montagne dated 1 February 2005 valued the annual fnancial burden of the company’s presence in the Puy-de-Dôme at 900 million euros. In order to manage their common interests, the city and the company have therefore learned to develop a partnership that involves a number of negotiations and compromises. Although for a long time the company’s presence has been an embarrassment for the image policy, these days its prestige is showcased and is an object of local pride. A few examples will help illustrate how the municipality works in partnership with Michelin. One example is Clermont-Ferrand’s sports image, as embodied by the ASM rugby team. The Association Sportive Michelin [Michelin Sports Association] became the Association Sportive Montferrandaise [Montferrand Sports Association] in 1922 in order to take part in the federal championships in compliance with ministerial guidelines. Despite the semantic shift of the “M” in “ASM”, it is however only since 2000 that the city of Clermont-Ferrand has agreed by contract to support the association with one million francs per year. Michelin also fully contributes to the excellence of teaching and local research. The municipality, which promotes in particular the image of a university city with 35,000 students and over 6000 researchers (that is, as many as there are Michelin workers), helps to fnance the Science and Technology University Centre [Centre Universitaire des Sciences et Techniques] and two of the three prestigious engineer schools in association with Michelin: the Institut Français de Mécanique Avancée [French Institute of Advanced Mechanical Engineering] created in 1991 (and chaired by Édouard Michelin), and the Institut Supérieur d’In- formatique, de Modélisation et de leurs Applications [Higher Institute of Information Technology, IT Modelling and its Applications].5

5 It should be noted that a number of Michelin employees teach at various universities in Clermont-Ferrand, as well as at the Institut d’administration des entreprises [Institute of Business Administration]. 226 C. VÉDRINE

Culture also has its share: Michel Rollier has been the chairman of the Comédie (Clermont-Ferrand’s performing arts theatre) since October 2012 and Jean-Dominique Senard a board member of the École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Communauté [Higher School of Art of Clermont Community], while in 2013 the company became the offcial partner of the Festival of Short Films [Festival international du court métrage]… In essence, understanding the company’s power over the city and the region, where local industrial, societal and urban developments take place, would require further research. In order to remain attractive, Michelin keeps a watchful eye on economic, urban, cultural, university, sports and transport assets. With regard to urban matters, members of the local government and company representatives meet fortnightly to discuss general urban planning matters, and housing for executives in particular. This has a twofold impact on Clermont-Ferrand: a gentrifcation of the historic centre and the creation of new accommodation, hotels and high-end boutiques, a long way from the old Socap from Michelinville. Moreover, another of Michelin’s concerns is restoring areas in the centre of the city, in particular those bordering the tram line built in 2006. All the more so as a tram on tyres was chosen to accommodate the company. It was put out to public tender in May 1996 but “in the meantime François Michelin made a personal representation to Roger Quillot and company men lobbied the SMTC, the Syndicat Mixte des Transports en Commun [urban public transport authority], the project owner”, according to Meneau (2001, 140–141*). In November 1996, the chairman of SMTC was replaced by Roger Quillot, then mayor of Clermont-Ferrand. Three years later, the revived project results in a tram on tyres… Equipped with “revolutionary tyres”, the tram is a new avenue for the company to introduce its innovations and advertising them. As Meneau points out, “it seems likely that the tram on tyres was a cost-effective opportunity for the company to experiment (op.cit. 2001, 141*), considering that Michelin benefted from fnancial support from the state and technical cooperation with other manufacturers. With the tram “boosting all your wishes”, “a new city starts”, according to the billboards in the city centre. The city’s technical services identifed four zones, or “plots”, coinciding with areas of urban “projects” along the tram route, with a large square, the place de Jaude, as its high point. A poster campaign promised a “new city vibe” thanks to the renovation of the square which was inaugurated on 10 December 2005. This concern for the city atmosphere is recent. Non-existent in the industrial city, 8 CONCLUSION 227 it did not feature in any political Clermont-Ferrand discourse until the early years of the twenty-frst century. It promises to engage all the senses in different ways, which encourages the construction of a new social dimension to the sharp cleavage in the concerns that are intrinsic to the creation of functional spaces. “More beautiful”, “blooming”, “welcoming”, “bright”, “enticing”, offering “a new and unique sensory experience”, promising a “better social life” and “encouraging company and collective emotions”—this is how the municipality qualifes the place de Jaude. In short, paternalism has made way for new forms of local interfer- ence to supervise the company’s new employees. The new Bibs are no longer welcomed in the discipline spaces, utilitarian, austere and isolated of Michelinville, but in attractive and leisure spaces in the centre of the city and in the outskirts. Bars or “lounges”, restaurants, night clubs, art galleries, performance halls, cinemas and gyms mushroom to keep the new employees happy. In this new city, single people are far from being isolated and are accommodated in so-called dynamic neighbourhoods that meet their needs. Clermont-Ferrand is in this respect the witness of the shift from a paternalistic policy that helped attracting and retaining employees by means of social protection provided by social and economic advantages, to wooing employees through professional and urban fulflment. In these dynamics, the improvement of the city through urban marketing makes it possible to become involved in the game of urban competition, but equally and more broadly it allows to join in the wooing game of urban consumption. The phantom city described by Harvey (1990) presenting itself to consumers of illusion is the setting of new control spaces, probably more underhand, that refect the shift from a ban on pleasure through surveillance and industrial discipline, to a pleasure injunction through the controlled consumption of leisure, culture and aesthetic (Védrine 2014, 2017). Finally, the discourse and the local urban policies seem to show an evolution of the spirit of capitalism, whose values hinge on the urban space and more broadly on urbanism, which is itself a “mixture of institutions and ideology” (Lefebvre 1972, 62—French edition). This leads me to make a fnal assumption, namely that the criticism of the old spirit of capitalism and paternalism is related to the criticism of the industrial city. Criticism of the functional, disciplinarian and polluting city has driven a marketing discourse geared towards a sustainable, patrimonial, aesthetic, cultural and leisure city. The promise of fulflment at work is conveyed by a promise of wellbeing and quality of life backed by urban 228 C. VÉDRINE policies and in particular the “big urban projects”, as the Carré Jaude of Clermont, inaugurated in 2013, has been described. Thus, in the shift from Fordism to the neoliberalisation process (Brenner and Theodore 2002), the notions of the “new spirit of capitalism” (project, risk, short term, mobility, fexibility, network) are nowadays applied to the “neoliberal city”, in the way the notions of the old spirit of capitalism (rational- ity, function, effciency, discipline) were applied to the industrial city. In the light of all these changes, a number of questions arise. What happened to those excluded from this socio-spatial identity transformation? I assume that urban exclusion is also couched in terms of a symbolic accessibility of the new spaces that calls forth new forms of city life in the wake of their refurbishment. Here, Michelin intervenes indirectly through the habits, practices and representations of the new Bibs who are imbued with a specifc company spirit. Which urban spirit do the urban projects seek to convey today? Which values do the urban policy narratives, produced in a kind of public-private partnership between Clermont-Ferrand and Michelin, promote? How do the urban cohesion and wooing tools aim to create local cultures and identities in the hope that they will be as effective as company cultures? Lastly, in view of the new spirit’s linkage to urban space, what everyday life methods of resistance, competence and resources have those who are not part of it elaborated? Concerning the new gentrifed spaces, how do they appropriate it? With what kind of practices? How can we describe their new urban citizenship? Indeed, a comparative work with other processes of gentrifcation in a post-industrial context, as in Brooklyn for example, highlights the particularity of Clermont-Ferrand. Yet, as I have already indicated, we are not dealing with a city where unemployment, poverty, urban decline or crime are rife, but with a declining number of workers (very few lay-offs with many retiring without replacement, and at the same time the local economic development is supported by the Side and MiLiVo) and an increased number of executives. The urban spaces are changing accordingly. Clermont-Ferrand is economically in good health. Its poor image was not linked to unemployment or poverty but to a frm and a local austere architecture. The control of space through a model of distribution of the “have/have-not” described by Krase and De Sena (2015) is not identical in Clermont-Ferrand, as the control of space actually happens in the new spaces of leisure “chic and hip” (op.cit. 2015, 3) intended for the executives. Therefore, modes of resistance described by Krase and De Sena (as MTOPP, Movement to Protect the People) 8 CONCLUSION 229 can hardly be compared to what happens in Clermont-Ferrand. Nevertheless, further research would allow us to understand if there are forms of ordinary resistance in the working-class culture (I insist: not unemployed but employees). What kind of new forms of contemporary working-class culture do they create? In what type of spaces and through what kind of practices and appropriations? Many topics to be investigated through anthropological approach to understand the experiences of the actors.

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A Bibs, 2, 3, 5–8, 11, 14, 16, 17, 45, Abandonment, 18, 151, 156, 163, 58, 62, 80, 87, 92, 97, 104, 166, 189, 202, 203, 205, 211, 105, 111, 115, 122, 125, 133, 213 140–142, 152–154, 157–159, Agents, 31, 48, 99, 105, 119–121, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175, 137, 155, 159 177–179, 182, 183, 186, 188, Ambivalence, 41, 132, 133, 179, 189, 193, 197, 202, 203, 206, 187–190, 221, 224 212–215, 219–222, 227, 228 Architecture, 5, 46, 66, 127, 196, 228 Body, 13, 15, 22, 39, 51, 52, 87, 100, Asceticism, 3, 72, 74, 83, 100, 103, 121–123, 125, 127, 135, 177 106, 108, 117, 122, 125, 146, Boulanger, Pierre, 28, 29, 65, 90, 91, 177, 196, 200, 209, 210 93, 136 Aviation, 26, 27

C B Capitalism, 2–8, 10, 11, 18, 83, 106, Barbier, Aristide, 24, 59, 60 107, 113, 114, 123, 151, 154, Believe, 47, 79, 80, 98, 104, 106, 156, 158, 160, 167, 175, 177, 160, 179 186, 209–213, 216, 219, 227, Belongs to, 4, 13, 50, 52, 94, 104, 228 219 Cataroux, 16, 30, 63, 76, 77, 126, Bibendum, 2, 16, 25, 43, 50, 51, 127, 132, 134, 163–165, 191, 53–59, 66, 71, 72, 75, 76, 125, 194, 217, 220, 222 126, 159, 162, 178, 194, 195, Catholicism, 41, 121, 146 216, 218, 219 Chantemerle, 31

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 231 C. Védrine, The Spirit of Capitalism According to the Michelin Company, Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96610-6 232 Index

Community, 226 154, 156–164, 166, 169–175, Company culture, 3, 4, 83, 210, 228 178–184, 186–190, 193, 201, Control, 9, 42, 87, 90, 96, 122, 125, 203–205, 209, 210, 212–214, 127, 129, 133, 137, 202, 227, 220, 225, 227, 229 228 Engineers, 31, 55, 63, 136, 225 Counter-narratives, 161, 163, 167, Entrepreneurial thought, 3 175, 178, 186, 217 Estaing, 30, 126, 127, 163, 221 Creations, 21, 25, 45, 47, 54, 57, 59, Estates, 36, 37, 117, 126, 127, 129, 62, 66, 71, 115, 120, 170, 189, 131, 132, 140, 191, 196, 221, 210, 218, 221, 224, 226, 227 222 Critique, 151, 152, 156 Executives, 2, 7, 9, 14, 15, 17, 18, 29, 31, 32, 34, 50, 51, 67, 73, 75, 102, 116–118, 134, 156, 158, D 160, 161, 180, 182, 184, 189, Daubrée, Ernest, 24 191, 193, 209–211, 213, 216, Desacralisation, 7, 8, 18, 100, 151, 217, 222–224, 226, 228 159, 162–165, 175, 178, Exploitation, 8, 9, 96, 97, 108, 113, 185–187, 189, 190, 203, 204, 152, 157, 177, 178, 189, 211 211, 212, 217, 220 Dignity, 33, 124, 135, 154, 168, 170–172, 174, 185, 204 F Disciplinary, 100, 115, 122, 137, 146 Father, 2, 7, 8, 57, 87, 91, 103, 121, Discourse, 4, 5, 12, 13, 22, 30, 42, 134, 139, 142, 145–147, 157, 50, 62, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 160, 164, 166, 183, 188–190, 125–127, 146, 151, 152, 158, 205, 212, 219 166, 171, 172, 177, 180, 182, Forgive, 160, 205 187, 198, 199, 218–220, 227

G E Gaze, 111, 132, 135–142, 144–147, Early retirement, 31, 160 157, 158, 166–168, 177, 197, Education, 6, 8, 32, 34–36, 38, 40, 198, 202–204, 212 61, 83, 92, 94, 104, 107, 111, Goodyear, 28 115–117, 119–121, 123, 146, Goodyear, Charles, 24 177, 219 Gravanches, 31, 126 Employees, 1–4, 6–9, 15, 17, 18, Guide, 4, 72, 145, 164, 218, 219 28–31, 36, 37, 39, 41, 48–50, 58, 64, 65, 74, 78, 80, 84–88, 92, 94–96, 98, 99, 101, 102, H 104, 105, 112, 113, 116, 118, Halbwachs, Maurice, 22, 42, 126 119, 122, 126, 131, 133–135, Heritage, 76, 145–147, 213, 216–220 137–139, 141, 146, 147, 153, Index 233

History, 2, 5–7, 9, 10, 13, 18, 21–23, M 28, 35, 42, 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, Memory, 6, 10, 17, 18, 21–23, 35, 65, 77, 78, 80, 90, 93, 123, 124, 42, 43, 45, 55, 76, 77, 79, 80, 126, 129, 146, 151–153, 155, 147, 162, 163, 178, 196, 197, 156, 160, 163, 165, 188, 194, 210, 216, 217, 219, 220 216, 217, 219, 220, 223 Michelin, Edouard, 2, 5, 7, 10, 16, Hygiene, 38, 123, 129 25, 26, 28, 29, 35, 38, 49, 50, 51, 59–61, 65, 76, 78, 89–94, 105, 126, 130, 131, 133, 146, I 147, 152, 153, 159, 162, 165, Identifcation, 4, 6, 46, 58, 66, 80, 87, 166, 180, 190, 200, 201, 94, 124, 131, 132, 138, 140– 213–216, 225 142, 166, 210, 212, 214, 216 Michelin, François, 2, 7, 8, 29, 50, 51, Identity, 4–7, 12, 42, 45, 46, 54, 65–67, 71–75, 83–85, 89–92, 58, 66, 78, 79, 87, 117, 125, 97, 99, 101, 106, 112–114, 130, 140–142, 144, 147, 164, 166, 131, 134, 136, 142, 145, 154, 171, 216, 217, 223, 228 161, 166, 173–175, 178–181, Indifference, 140, 157, 158, 165, 203, 183, 184, 186, 188, 205, 226 212, 217, 221 Michelin spirit, 1–6, 8, 11, 14, 17, 18, Indignation, 154, 167, 186 31, 39, 46, 48, 52, 53, 62, 64, Industrialisation, 5, 30, 32, 33 67, 68, 71, 72, 75, 80, 83, 91, Inequalities, 86, 99, 124, 134, 94, 95, 99–101, 103, 105, 111, 169–172, 204, 211 115, 119, 121, 125, 126, 130, Infantilising, 42 132, 133, 138, 140–142, 144– Injustice, 145, 159, 167–172, 175, 146, 153, 155, 157, 160, 167, 177, 203–206, 220 172, 175, 177, 181, 195–197, Insecurity, 84, 163, 203, 211 200, 203, 206, 209, 210, 216, Invention, 12, 25, 26, 54, 57, 68 219, 223 Montferrand, 30, 39, 191, 221, 225 Moral, 3–5, 32, 33, 35, 37–39, 59, J 66, 78, 83, 85, 94, 97, 100, Justice, 147, 167–172, 177, 179, 189, 102–107, 113–117, 120, 121, 205 123, 124, 127, 133, 134, 139, 140, 146, 154, 169, 170, 174, 177, 201, 209–212, 219 L Myth, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17, 18, 21, La Combaude, 27, 31, 126, 191 23, 25, 41–43, 45–47, 49, 51, Ladoux, 27, 31, 126, 159 52, 61, 65–68, 71, 72, 75, 76, La Plaine, 36, 78, 85, 129, 191 78–80, 87, 126, 127, 140, 151, Le Play, Frédéric, 33, 36 152, 159–161, 163, 165, 179, 190, 192, 194, 198–202, 209, 211–213, 215–220 234 Index

N 183, 185–187, 203–205, 209, Narrative, 6, 10, 21, 22, 42, 45, 211, 212, 216, 217, 221 47–49, 51–54, 57, 58, 61, 62, Red Guide, 25, 27, 54, 57, 66, 164 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 80, 84, 146, Religious, 32, 40, 46, 50, 62, 78, 83, 161–163, 178, 185, 211, 215, 100, 103, 106–108, 113, 120, 218, 228 121, 209, 214 New spirit of capitalism, 7, 151, 156, Resistance, 42, 63, 90, 93, 129, 152, 167, 177, 211, 212, 223, 228 155–157, 163, 166–178, 178, 185–187, 204, 212, 228, 229 Rite, 6, 46, 47, 79, 164 O Rollier, François, 29 Obligation, 32, 84, 87, 88, 107, 115, Rubber, 5, 23–25, 30, 35, 40, 54, 61, 121, 211 63, 152, 153, 190, 196, 199, 224 Observation, 10, 13, 15, 16, 104, 112 Rules, 6, 21, 45–47, 62, 75, 80, 83, 88, 91, 92, 100, 104, 115, 117–120, 123, 129, 136, 138, P 171, 206 Paternalism, 3, 6, 30, 32, 34, 36, 40–43, 66, 72, 78, 84, 87, 134, 141, 147, 153, 157, 200, 203, S 205, 210, 211, 213, 216, 222, Sacrifce, 41, 59, 61, 68, 87, 100, 102, 223, 227 118, 124, 158, 160, 164, 172, Patronage, 32–35, 40 177 Practices, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 22, 30, 41, Secret, 3, 4, 95–100, 133, 137, 141, 42, 46, 68, 80, 91, 96, 98, 99, 183, 189, 192–194, 199 101, 105, 107, 113, 117, 131, Security, 8, 113, 152, 155, 157, 162, 133, 136, 138, 141, 164, 168, 167, 196, 203 171, 198, 210, 222, 224, 228, Social advantages, 40, 153, 157, 190 229 Social classes, 151, 153, 184 Protection, 6, 8, 32, 38, 83, 95, 118, Social services, 17, 36, 38, 39, 126 147, 154, 156, 157, 164, 167, Sources, 10, 14, 16, 17, 21, 22, 47, 169, 175, 203, 211 48, 54, 62, 64, 72, 74, 90, 107, Puiseux, Robert, 29, 63, 65, 89–91, 126, 141, 147, 151, 152, 160, 93, 94, 215 167, 186, 190, 218 Space, 5, 8–10, 15, 25, 30, 38, 42, 48, 54, 72, 75, 77, 78, 96, 100, 101, R 104, 111, 119, 122, 124–133, Race, 26, 27, 56, 139, 178, 218 136, 137, 140, 142, 145, 146, Recognition, 7, 8, 12, 18, 46, 47, 164, 168, 170, 173, 177, 185, 68, 80, 107, 118, 135, 136, 186, 194, 197, 198, 210, 212, 138, 140–142, 145, 158–161, 216, 221, 222, 224, 227–229 163–165, 167, 175, 177, 179, Index 235

Spirit of capitalism, 3, 4, 7, 18, 106, V 107, 151, 156, 160, 167, 177, Values, 3, 4, 6, 7, 18, 21, 34, 35, 209–212, 221, 223, 227, 228 37–39, 41, 45–48, 54, 59, 61, Subject-hero, 6, 45, 80, 146, 215 62, 66–68, 71, 72, 78–80, 83–85, Supervisors, 31, 138 87, 97, 100–104, 106, 111–113, Surveillance, 137–140, 147, 157, 198, 116, 117, 119–121, 123, 124, 222, 227 127, 133, 134, 136, 141, 145, 146, 156, 158, 163, 166, 169, 170, 177, 181, 182, 200, 206, T 209–211, 218, 219, 227 Thrift, 100, 102, 106, 117, 120, 138 Totem, 59, 66, 76, 77, 126 Trade unions, 4, 7, 10, 15–18, W 22, 114, 120, 152–156, 161, Welfare, 32, 35, 36, 38, 46, 49, 78, 168–170, 172–174, 180, 185, 90, 114, 126, 135, 141 186, 204–206 Transmission, 17, 22, 23, 45, 47–49, 87–90, 100, 104, 111, 121, 125, Z 126, 133, 134, 146, 195, 206, Zingraff, René, 29, 50, 91, 136 210

U Urban anthropology, 11, 213, 216